


a haunted house (with a picket fence)

by thesemovingparts



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: (uncle), (yes i am sorry we are killing her but like not in a gross way), Adult Peter Parker, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Everyone Needs A Hug, Exes to Lovers, F/M, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Kid Fic, Mentions of failed suicide attempt, Peter Parker is a Good Dad, Slow Burn, Unplanned Pregnancy, it is important to me that you know that, not a love triangle!!!, the death of Gwen Stacy, we're doing a frame story babey!, we're not saying happy bc....
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:48:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 46,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27865642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesemovingparts/pseuds/thesemovingparts
Summary: I’m pregnant,she had told him, and Peter hadn’t much experience at seeing fear in Gwendolyne Stacy’s eyes, but he did then.She had tried to cover it up with confidence, with lengthy monologues about her right to choose, and then she had, very quietly and very timidly, held Peter’s hand and askedwould you help me if I kept her?And in no universe would Peter have said no, in no reality would he have stepped away from that woman and the brand new little piece of her that he had yet to meet.*OR:  Gwen Stacy’s legacy is a little girl without a father by the name of Maxine. This is how she came to be.
Relationships: Harry Osborn & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones & Gwen Stacy, Michelle Jones & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones & Peter Parker & Gwen Stacy, Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Peter Parker/Gwen Stacy
Comments: 99
Kudos: 115





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so I am sure that plenty of people have gone into the legacy of Gwen Stacy on this site already (and eons better than my attempt here) but I've gone and put my own little kid fic twist on it and appreciate you stopping by to give it a chance <3 
> 
> posting the first 2 chapters at once bc the first is just a little prologue and yes, I do hate myself for continuing to kill off characters that I love but alas here we are again-- hope you enjoy!
> 
> love,  
> prem

Max woke up that morning to the blaring alarm of her cell phone hours before the sun was set to rise. 

She woke with a groan, and then with a smack of the snooze button and subsequent extra five minutes of sleep, and then, finally, to the sound of her uncle yelling at her from the kitchen. 

“Max, I don’t hear movement!”

Max buried her face directly in her pillow and let out one final groan of dissatisfaction at the far too early hour. 

“ _Maxine?!”_

“I’m up, I’m up!” she called out as she pushed herself up on tired arms with eyes half-lidded and hair in a chaotic halo of tangles around her head. 

A scrub of her palms over her face and sip of water from the bottle on her bedside table later, and Max was tipping out of bed and onto her feet, trudging out of her room and to the bathroom to get ready for the day. 

“Hey, little lady-- big day!”

“Talk quieter,” she grumbled at him over her shoulder. “It’s way too early for you to be this chipper.” 

He was laughing as she closed the bathroom door. She wasn’t even awake yet. 

The thing was, Max was turning sixteen that day. Well, not technically until four thirty-seven in the afternoon-- the exact time of day she had been born-- but her birthday still it was. So maybe she should have been the chipper one, but it was five o’clock in the morning and she was a teenager and she was really not feeling it yet.

Shower. Brushed teeth. Dressed. 

“Breakfast?”

“Nah, Uncle Pete,” she said as she walked into the kitchen, beginning to gather her books from the table and dropping them unceremoniously into her backpack. “I’m having birthday breakfast with Haeli, remember?” 

“Right, yeah,” Peter nodded, pouring himself a hefty cup of coffee as usual. “I’m still picking you up from school though, right? You haven’t gone and gotten yourself plans with someone cooler?” 

“And break tradition?” Max made a face at him. “What do you take me for?” 

Peter grinned at her. “A teenager.” 

“I am choosing to take that as a compliment,” Max lifted her chin loftily. “Rather than your misplaced resentment for my generation.” 

“Okay,” he laughed at her. “Enough of all that.” 

“You can’t tell me what to do, it’s my birthday,” she said, trying to display this fact by stealing his mug right out of his hands and taking a sip. 

“No way,” he took it right back just before the coffee actually touched her lips. “I refuse to bankroll your budding caffeine addiction.” 

“Evil uncle,” she scowled at him, but grabbed her backpack off the counter and slung it over her shoulder. “I’ll see you later!” 

“Hey, hey, not so fast,” he pushed off the counter and approached her with open arms. 

“Seriously?” she said flatly, even as she allowed him to pull her into a tight hug.

“Have a good day, birthday girl.” he ignored her snark, because both of them knew it was only for show. 

“Yeah, yeah, you too, old man,” she rolled her eyes as she pulled away, grinning all the while. 

“And say hi to Haeli for me!” 

“Will do! Bye!” she called over her shoulder as she strode out the front door and into the day. 

*

Max had met Haeli Pareekh when they were in the same rotation of classes in sixth grade. 

While Max had been a Queens resident all her life, Haeli had moved to town after twelve years of California dreaming-- or so Max teased her whenever her more west coast tendencies slipped out, even all these years later. 

The Birthday Breakfast tradition had begun because Haeli’s parents were big into family time on even the smallest of holidays and the only time she had to celebrate with a friend was going to be in the early, early hours before school started. 

Plus, Max and Peter had their own birthday traditions to fulfill in the afternoon too, so the timing worked for both of them. 

“Have you asked your uncle to start teaching you to drive yet?” Haeli asked as she dug into a pile of greasy hash browns. 

“Ugh, no,” Max made a face. 

“Why not though?”

“I don’t really need to drive,” Max shrugged. “Plus, it’s not like we’d be able to afford a second car-- with just the one even Peter has to take the subway half the time.” 

“Okay, fair,” Haeli rolled her eyes. “But, like, if you don’t ever take the opportunity to drive one of the Stark’s crazy cars I may never forgive you.” 

“The hubris of assuming Tony would let me even stand next to one of those things,” Max laughed. “God, imagine if I wrecked it.”

“I would give a really brilliant eulogy at your funeral,” Haeli lifted up her pinky in offering. “Swear to it.” 

Max leveled her with a mocking glare before she relented and wrapped her pinky up with her friend’s. 

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Just promise you won’t tell the eighth grade camping trip story.”

“Taking it to my grave,” Haeli replied stoically. 

Max grinned at her and took a huge gulp of coffee, immediately burning her tongue. 

*

The two of them weren’t popular enough at school for there to be any sort of recognition for Max’s birthday throughout their classes, but they were both okay with that. 

Haeli was captain of the Spell Bowl team and Max was the girl who didn’t really show up for high school extracurriculars because she was too busy being a ballet dancer attending a studio downtown on scholarship four nights a week. 

She did well in school, and she worked really hard because everyone in her life wouldn’t stand for a _girl as smart as her taking her education for granted_ but she also knew she wasn’t an academic. Not the way that the people who raised her had tended to be, with everything from the sciences and mathematics to communications and liberal arts. 

So she got through the day on the joy of finding a little birthday note from her best friend slid into the slots of her locker and the knowledge that she would get to pick takeout from anywhere for dinner and that she was, by all proper cultural standards, a real young woman. 

*

Peter was leaning against his car outside the front of the school when Max hurried out with the final bell. 

He was early for once-- a birthday present all its own-- and grinned at her broadly as he waved with one hand and held up a big bouquet of lilies with the other. Max hurried towards him as quickly as she could without looking too eager or drawing too much attention from her fellow students that were filtering out of the school and back out into the sunlight. 

Peter was younger than the rest of the parents in line for pick-up, and had a baby face on top of that, so he had been confused for her older brother on more than one occasion. Which was maybe why she let herself throw herself into a big hug with him right there in front of everybody, or perhaps it was because she was growing less self-conscious with all the wisdom of young womanhood. 

“Oof,” Peter exhaled with a sharp chuckle as she barreled into him. “Good to see you too.” 

“Taco truck?” she asked as she stepped out of his embrace. “We have time right?”

Peter checked his watch. “Yeah, we can do that,” he nodded. “But no eating in the car or I’ll get in trouble for smelling up the seats again.”

“Deal,” Max grinned, ducking under his arm and sliding into the passenger seat. “Taco time!” 

*

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Peter said, leaning up against the hood of the car where Max was sitting cross-legged, munching happily on a soft taco. “The dancer metabolism really does rival the spider metabolism.”

“Well, that plus the fact that we got stuck with the earliest lunch this semester,” Max complained through a mouthful of food. “I mean, eleven o’clock in the morning? Bullshit.”

“Language,” Peter reprimanded without any bite. He didn’t have much of a leg to stand on when it came to cursing. “And slow down, you’re gonna choke.” 

Max slowed her chewing a comical amount and Peter rolled his eyes at her with unfettered amusement. 

“You’re the light of my life,” Peter said. “But you were also sent from Hell to torture me, you know that?”

Max grinned, all teeth and mushed up taco. 

“Yep!”

*

She held the bouquet in her lap during the drive, thumb and forefinger smoothing over one of the petals with a repetitive, soothing motion. 

The bittersweetness of the day always hit her on the drive. It was a sensation that Max was well accustomed to, and sometimes it felt as though her life as a whole was built on a foundation of the bittersweet, so much so that she barely even noticed it anymore. 

It hit her on the drive though, so she held the lilies in her lap. 

*

The cemetery was familiar, as were the paths winding through it, the headstones and their quiet identities. Their end-of-May visit was always Max’s favorite time of year to be in that space, which she understood was an oddity in and of itself, having a favorite time of year to take a walk amongst the dead, but was that not the life of an orphan? An oddity all its own? 

There was always sadness in this place, always would be, but at least in May the trees were blooming. At least in May the grass was green. At least in May the sun was out as she and Peter picked their way carefully to their little plot in the center of their universe. 

Groundskeepers were very diligent around here, and so the dying flowers from their last visit had already been cleared away when Max knelt to place the bouquet of lilies on the ground before that short grey headstone. 

She placed her backpack to the side and settled in on her sit bones, staining her jeans with freshly mown grass and not caring a lick. Peter sat down next to her, checking his watch as he did so. 

“Almost time,” he said. “You ready?” 

“Mmhmm,” Max nodded before leaning over enough to rest her head on his shoulder. 

Peter wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and began. 

“On this day, sixteen years ago, Gwendolyne Maxine Stacy was going about her day, taking the train home from work when all of a sudden…”

“Her water broke,” Max chimed in with a faint smile. 

“Right there on the train!” Peter continued. “She can later be quoted as saying she _earned the right to make a mess for the MTA after all the times her train got delayed while pregnant and having to pee.”_

“Valid.” 

“So,” Peter pressed forward, holding back a chuckle. “There she is-- in labor in the middle of a rush-hour subway, no service on her phone, and by the time she’s above ground she’s, like, about to pop--”

“Gross.”

“She’s about to pop,” Peter repeated as Max made a gagging noise. “And she finally gets this guy on the phone-- really the hero of the story if you think about it.”

“ _Peter Benjamin Parker,”_ Max said in her best approximation of an angry woman in labor. _“If you don’t find a way to get me to a hospital in the next ten minutes I will personally drop kick you into the fucking Hudson.”_

“I’ll forgive the swearing for now but you’re on thin ice, Maxine,” Peter teased. 

“It’s a quote!”

“ _Anyway,”_ Peter ignored her. “In the nick of time, the hero swoops in-- literal superhero get-up and all-- and you won’t believe what she said--”

In unison, the two of them recited: _“If this baby falls out of me because of your dumbass alter ego--”_

They both laughed and Peter quickly kissed the top of Max’s head before continuing. 

“But the baby luckily didn’t fall out,” he said. “And they made it to the hospital with twenty minutes to spare before, at exactly four thirty-seven, a truly disgusting, wailing, _beautiful_ baby girl was born. And she named her Maxine Gwendolyne Stacy--”

“Because if she just spent nine months rearranging her genes to make a whole person, her name was going to reflect it,” Max finished, heavy with second-hand knowledge and unfulfilled grief and a little bit of giddiness that even she didn’t understand. 

“Happy Birthday, little lady,” Peter said softly, matching her tone as he was good at doing. 

Max knew, distantly, that he understood in one way or another, but she also didn’t. Not on days like today, when it felt so hugely massive that she was so grown and her mother wasn’t there to see it. 

She sat there with Peter, quietly and contemplatively for a few minutes while they both took a moment to speak to that woman whose story outlived her. 

Max thought about all of the events since her last visit that she would have told her mom if her mom was more than a slab of stone, she considered how Gwendolyne Stacy would have felt about her love of ballet, her distaste for algebra but eye for geometry. 

She wondered, above all else, if she would have been proud of that little bundle of genetics, rearranged. 

“I’m ready to go now,” Max said, sitting up straight and taking her first deep breath since entering the cemetery. 

“Alright,” Peter said. “Help an old man off the ground, why don’t you?” he then asked, reaching out his hands to an already standing Max. 

“Uncle Peter,” she looked at him flatly, grabbing his hand and yanking upwards despite herself. “You jump off of buildings for a living.” 

“Ah, see, no one pays me to jump off buildings,” he began to back away towards the path that would lead them to their car. “That’s just a cool hobby. I’m a cool uncle!” 

“Doubtful,” Max smirked. 

She offered her mother one last glance, took notice of the new stone that Peter had placed on top of her headstone, and walked away. 

*

Something was itching just to the left of Max’s grief as they drove back to the apartment. She couldn’t quite place what it was, but the heaviness of it was different from the familiar weight of Gwen Stacy’s too short life that she carried with her every day. 

“Did you really swing in as Spider-Man to take her to the hospital?” Max asked before she could even consider the implications of such a question. 

“What?” Peter glanced between her and the road a couple of times with bafflement. “Of course I did. You think I’ve been lying to you all these years?” 

The truth was, Max had no way of knowing whether or not he was lying to her-- whether or not anyone was lying to her when it came to these iconic, lively stories she’d grown up learning to wrap around her shoulders at night in place of a security blanket. 

All of her knowledge was hand-me-down at best and it was itching, itching, itching at the left side of her skull. 

“No,” she said, trying to brush it off. “It’s just-- y’know, insane.” 

“What can I say,” Peter grinned. “I’m great under pressure.”

Max grinned back at him despite not quite feeling it. 

It wasn’t weird, right? The fact that she didn’t know what came next in the story, the fact that she didn’t know what came before. 

It wasn’t weird. 

*

By the time they made it home, Max was on the verge of boiling over with the completely normal, not-weirdness of it all. 

“Okay,” Peter began as he made his way into the apartment. There were balloons tied haphazardly to various cabinets and tables, streamers hung from the ceiling by webs, and a suspiciously cake-sized box on the kitchen counter. “So, the real party is obviously not until this weekend because you’re a nerd who refuses to skip school, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still celebrate.”

Max had stopped walking in the entryway, not dropping her backpack or kicking off her shoes or any of the _coming home and getting comfortable_ rituals that she usually participated in. Peter was babbling on from the kitchen about ordering food and putting on a movie and how _hopefully she didn’t have much homework because this cake isn’t gonna eat itself--_

“Why’s it always the same story?” Max asked, just loud enough to stop Peter’s ongoing tirade. 

He poked his head out of the kitchen with a curious look on his face, and it might have been comical in any other situation, but not this one. 

“What?” he asked. “Come on, put your stuff down, we’ve got birthday things to do and your aunt will be home soon.” 

“No, I--” she cut herself off with a frustrated sound, hands wrapping tighter around the straps of her backpack. 

Peter stepped fully into view then, closer and more worried than confused at that point. 

“What’s wrong?” 

“Every year,” Max forced out, all of the energy of her gaze directed at the carpet between them rather than on Peter himself. “Every year it’s-- We go to the cemetery and we visit Mom and it’s always the same story.” 

Peter cocked his head to the side and there was softness there-- always softness-- but there was also the eternal defensive barrier that flung itself up whenever they talked about Gwen Stacy. No conversation-- not drugs or sex or violence-- made Peter Parker as nervous as when Max asked him even the simplest questions about her mother. 

She was sick of it. 

“Kiddo, I thought-- I thought you liked going to visit her but if you don’t--”

“It’s not about that,” Max groused, very nearly stomping her foot in frustration before catching herself. 

“Okay,” Peter continued gently. “Can you tell me what it is about? I’m sorry, I’m just-- I don’t understand.” 

“Every _year,”_ she reiterated. “We go and see her and every year you tell the same story, but-- if I try to get you to go into more detail or, or-- tell me anything else about her you clam up! As if you always think I’m too young or naive or whatever to be allowed to know more about the woman who gave _birth_ to me.” 

“Max, can we sit down?” Peter asked, clearly grasping at straws. “Just sit down and talk about this?”

“I don’t want to sit down!” Max really did stomp her foot that time, voice loud enough that she knew Peter would probably have to field questions from Missus Bailey and her wife next door in the morning, but Max really didn’t care about that. “I want-- I want you to have even the tiniest amount of respect for me and understand that you have-- no _right_ to keep information about her away from me.” 

“Max--”

“I deserve to know where I come from!” she continued without letting him get a word in, because sixteen years of being kept in the dark was enough and she had plenty of built up frustration and anger and confusion to last them a whole night of this. “I deserve it and you keep refusing to let me have-- have any piece of her for myself,” Max’s voice cracked with the beginnings of a sob. “You’re selfish-- you’re so, so selfish with her and it’s not _fair!”_

And with that, she felt the tears coming and had no interest in crying in front of him, not when she had finally gotten the chance to say everything that she hadn’t even entirely realized she was feeling. So she stormed past him, through the living room and down the small hallway to her own. 

“Max, wait--”

She slammed the door in his face and immediately locked it, dropping her backpack at her feet as she began to cry in earnest. 

Face down on her bed and arms clutching desperately to her pillow, Max wept. She wept for something too mixed up in her own body for her to really put words to it, but it was full-bodied and it was cavernous and it was enough that when Peter knocked gently at her door and asked to be let in she actually yelled at him to _go away_ for maybe the second or third time ever in her life. 

It was her birthday, and for her friends, for all the kids at school who went home to their real parents with the family portraits on the wall and who never had to cry over a family tree assignment in elementary school because their mom was dead and they didn’t even know their dad’s last name-- for those kids a birthday was a celebration. 

For little orphan Maxine, it was just another reminder of how abnormal her entire existence was, how much of a fucking burden on people who had never asked for her. 

“Max, I’m sorry,” Peter said from the other side of the door, just as Max was starting to get control of her breathing once more. “I know you want space, so just-- if you’re ready to talk at any point, I’m right in the living room, alright?”

Max didn’t respond, because she knew Peter didn’t expect her to, and she listened as his footsteps did in fact retreat to the living room. 

She stayed where she was in bed, thinking about how stupid she felt but also how justified and wondering if that was a regular part of growing up or if it was just another Max Stacy thing. 

The colon on the digital clock at her bedside blinked the seconds away slowly as she listened to her aunt arrive home, the hushed voices in the living room discussing her tantrum, the door opening yet again, about an hour later and the smell of takeout that accompanied it. 

“Hey, Maxine?” Peter knocked softly at the door once more. “You don’t have to talk to me, but I brought you something to eat.” 

Max turned her head, but didn’t move to get up, considering the weight of her frustration against that of her hunger. 

“Veggie dumplings?” he continued uncertainly. “Come on, you’ve gotta eat dinner at some point, kiddo.” 

With a deep breath and a hand over her tear-flushed face, Max pushed herself out of bed and across the room. 

Door unlocked, opened, only to see Peter’s concerned face above a heaping plate of Chinese food from Max’s favorite restaurant. 

“Thanks,” she said as he handed it over and she set it on the dresser next to the door. 

“Um, I also--” Peter bit down on his tongue, clearly struggling with something. Max considered closing the door, but seeing him reminded her that even when she was mad at the man, she still loved him. “Just--”

He stepped back further down the hallway and Max furrowed her brow in the beat it took for him to reappear with a box in his hands. 

“I think you should have these,” he handed the box over to Max, and she looked at him quizzically before stepping back into her room and sitting down on the bed with the box in her lap. 

Peter followed her after a moment of hesitation, standing with his hands in his pockets while she slid open the folded-over flaps of cardboard. 

“Journals?” she asked, looking up at him and then back down at the jumbled pile of moleskines and spiral notebooks and little pocket notebooks held shut by an elastic band. 

“They were your mom’s,” Peter said and Max’s head shot up, hands tightening on the cardboard. 

“She kept a diary?” 

“After she got pregnant, um,” Peter continued, trepidatious and guilty and aching. “She decided that it sucked that we never really have much of an idea of what it was like around the time we were born-- when we were too small to create memories-- so, she started keeping a record. For you.” 

Max felt her heart do something that she wasn’t sure it had ever done before-- overwhelmed at the sight of all that brand new life sitting in her lap. 

“And then when she died,” Peter continued. “I-- Well, I tried to keep going as well as I could. She was a much better writer than me-- you’ll see-- but I felt like, I dunno…” he trailed off, shook his head at himself. “I was planning to wait until you were eighteen, but you’re right. I’ve been selfish with her, and-- and you deserve to get to know her the way the rest of us did.” 

She processed what he was saying, began thumbing through the stacks and noticing the way they were each labeled with a range of months or years-- presumably depending on how frequently each of them had been written. Some of them seemed to have photographs-- polaroids and printed pictures pasted into the pages, straining the binding and making the journals fat around the outside edge. 

“Okay,” Peter said quietly. “I’ll, um-- If you have any questions or want to-- talk about anything at all. I promise to be-- honest with you.”

Max lifted her head as he was turning to leave, caught sight of the look on his face, and felt one of the sharper edges stuck in her chest begin to round out. 

“Uncle Peter?”

“Yeah?” he turned around, eager to hear her speak. 

“Thank you.” 

Finally, finally, he was able to smile at her-- small and meaningful and real.

“I know I mess up a lot,” he said. “But you know I’d do anything for you, right?” 

“Yeah,” Max nodded. “I know.”

*

Max gingerly picked up the journal with the year before that of her birth scrawled onto a piece of masking tape on the binding. It looked to be the earliest date recorded in the group of them and as she pulled it into her lap she could feel all the heft of the moment, took stock of it and breathed it in. 

It was a plain, solid-colored moleskine notebook, a once-bright yellow gone faded with age and dirtied around the edges with use. As Max cracked it open, the spine creaked quietly, but fell open before her with ease. 

_Gwendolyne Maxine Stacy_ it read on the inside cover, right above a phone number to call if it was found. And then, at the top of the first page in handwriting that was curly in some places and straight up-and-down in others like some arbitrary combination of print and cursive, Gwen had written:

_Dear Baby,_

Max closed the journal with a quiet _smack_ and pressed shaking fingers against pursed lips, trying desperately not to start crying all over again. 

Was it too much? Was Peter right and she should wait another two years to dive in and immerse herself in the story of how she came to be?

It wasn’t as if Max didn’t already know she had been an accident. She had never met her father and she knew her mom had only been twenty-two when she got pregnant, but maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe there were things that she thought she wanted to know but would regret looking for upon discovering. 

Maybe she was better off going about her life not knowing. 

Max got up off of the bed and paced the small room back and forth a handful of times, stretching her legs and shaking out her hands before taking a few long gulps of water and sitting right back down where she had been. 

She picked the journal up, opened it--

_Dear Baby,_

_That might be the scariest thing I’ve ever written, but Stacy's love a good challenge. I’m sure you’ll get that soon enough…_

Max kept reading. 


	2. Gwen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Dear Baby,_
> 
> _Some days I feel so infinitely young that I can’t comprehend what it will mean to teach you about the world._
> 
> _I’ll figure it out, I swear to you, but until then I have some learning of my own to do._

_Dear Baby,_

_I have always prided myself on being unafraid in the face of adversity and enthusiastic in the face of a challenge. I think I’m still deciding which one you are…_

*

Gwen Stacy had partaken in all of three one night stands in her twenty-two years of life. 

She lost her virginity to a boy in her chemistry class, senior year of high school right before they both moved on to separate colleges and separate lives. 

During her second semester of her freshman year at Empire State University, she slept with some guy she met at a house party two weeks before she started seriously dating Peter Parker. 

And, perhaps most notably, she got very lonely eight months post-Peter and fucked a literal travelling salesman who was selling new lab equipment at Stark Industries during her workday. 

Gwen Stacy had only had three one night stands, because she had a plan for her life and wasting time on strangers who probably wouldn’t even be able to make her come was never part of that plan. 

Making mistakes that derailed her career was not a part of that plan, being blatantly stupid was not part of that plan, and neither, most certainly, was getting pregnant at twenty-two years old. 

Pregnant. 

She took a moment to be glad she lived alone, because she had been crying on the bathroom floor for two straight hours and any roommate worth a damn probably would have had her committed already. 

_Pregnant._

She had things to do! She had a job ladder to climb and an entire field of science to take by storm and then-- _then,_ once she had years of successes and had done all of the hard work to attain some semblance of stability-- then she was supposed to take the time to decide if she wanted a child. 

Did she want a child? 

Gwen’s mother had been but a couple of years older than she was now when she had her eldest daughter, and she’d graduated high school with people whose facebook pages had turned into mommy blogs in the past few years, but she felt so young. Too young. 

She pushed herself up off of the tile and splashed cold water on her face. And then again. And then one more time until she felt just marginally less pathetic about how she had spent her afternoon sobbing over three plastic sticks, bought from a CVS down the road earlier that morning. 

Looking at herself in the mirror, she saw the flushed cheeks and bloodshot eyes yes, but first and foremost she saw a child. 

This wasn’t a decision she could make on her own, not without consultation of a trusted friend. 

Gwen threw on a coat and a pair of shoes and stormed out of her apartment with a newfound determination. 

*

She slipped in through the front door by holding it open for a woman carrying her groceries, and then took the steps two at a time until she was outside the Parker-Osborn residence. 

Generally, she kept her visits to a minimum because even Harry Osborn’s compulsive neatness was nothing compared to the chaos that followed Peter wherever he went, but desperate times. 

“Parker! Osborn!” she called through the door as she pounded her fist against peeling paint. Even Gwen herself wasn’t sure which one she was looking for, but she knew that either one would be a good sounding board for the accelerating ticker tape scrolling through her head. 

Fumbling noises inside, something definitely falling over-- possibly an entire person-- and then the door swung open just in time for Peter to have to dodge Gwen’s still knocking fist. 

“Jesus,” he said. “You know my neighbors already fully hate me right? You don’t need to actively try and ruin that for me, I already did it myself.” 

Gwen snorted, seeing the very moment that Peter began to take in the actual state of her, all unpolished and tainted with fear. 

“Hey, you alright?” he asked, brow furrowed in classic Parker concern. 

“I’m pregnant,” she responded without preempt. 

Usually, Gwen would get a little thrill at being able to floor him in this way-- to get to watch his eyebrows jump up higher on his forehead and his lips part in silent exclamation. He had the face of a cartoon character, expressive and loud and sincere, and usually-- _usually,_ Gwen loved to pull at his strings just to watch it dance. 

“I’m gonna come inside now,” she said when he continued to gape at her like a fish out of water. 

“Right-- yeah, of course,” Peter stepped aside, allowing Gwen to stride in and immediately start pacing the length of his living room, in between the forest-green couch in need of a spring replacement and the coffee table that Gwen knew had once resided in May Parker’s home. “Gwendy…”

“It’s my decision--” she blurted. “What I do next, it’s my decision.” 

“Of course it is,” Peter had closed the front door but hadn’t moved out of that general space yet, just watching her with careful apprehension. 

“I’m pro-choice. I’ve always been pro-choice,” she continued, a frantic nature to her words that was unusual for a woman who had known what she needed to do in nearly every scenario since she was seventeen and her dad died and she had to grow up a little faster than expected. “If I want to have an abortion, I’m gonna have an abortion.”

She crossed her arms tight over her chest, stopping her pacing abruptly and clenching down on her jaw to keep it from visibly trembling. 

“If that’s what you want I’ll drive you myself,” Peter said gently. Gwen pursed her lips, looked out the window that let out onto the fire escape. “Is that what you want?” 

She quickly swiped the sleeve of her jacket under her eye to catch a stray tear. 

“I don’t know what I want,” she admitted what was already obvious. She wouldn’t have been so worked up about it if she had, after all.

“That’s okay.”

“I mean, I’ve always thought about being a mom,” she continued. “Just-- When I thought about it, I was ten years older and, you know, in a committed relationship instead of just at the start of my career and single and carrying a stranger’s baby.” 

Peter looked maybe a little bit out of his depth, and Gwen was sympathetic to that, she really was. She was just also too far down her own rabbit hole of stress to dedicate any energy to his feelings. 

Because there was a part of her that did know what she wanted, and Gwen had been ignoring it for hours because it was absurd. It was utterly ridiculous, this notion that she had what it took to raise a baby on her own when she had only just graduated college and still had to google basic dinner recipes because she was convinced she was doing it wrong.

She couldn’t be responsible for a whole second life-- she couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t-- but that part of her, the one that was getting harder to ignore, was screaming that she wanted to. 

“Peter,” she said, suddenly earnest. “If I decide to keep her, can you-- I know it’s too much to ask, but could you promise me that I wouldn’t be alone?” 

An unreadable expression crossed his face as he exhaled something like a laugh, but not quite. 

“God,” he said. “As long as I have something to say about it, that’ll never happen.” 

Gwen Stacy was having a baby. 

*

_Dear Baby,_

_Welcome to team Stacy, I suppose._

*

It took her all of three weeks to decide that she very much did not enjoy the miracle of pregnancy. 

Four days in a row of puking in the employee restrooms at SI when she returned from her lunch hour was enough for her to realize that she was not going to be one of those women who glowed. It was also enough for her coworkers to start figuring out that something was up, and the gossip train in a building full of scientists was just as relentless, if not more, than any other workplace. 

“Are you telling people at work about the baby yet?” Peter asked her one afternoon when they both happened to be leaving the Tower at the same time. He didn’t work there, of course, but he also did kind of work there. 

“What? I’m only eight weeks, no way,” Gwen said. 

“Oh. Okay,” he grimaced. 

“What’s that face mean? What did you do?”

“It’s just--” Peter sighed. “Tony asked me if I knocked you up.”

Gwen gaped at him. “You told him no, right?”

“Of course!” 

She looked at him with blatant skepticism. It didn’t take long for him to break under the pressure of the lie. 

“He may or may not be offering to shake down the actual father for child support--”

“Peter!”

“But I told him to not do that under any circumstances!” Peter finished hurriedly. “He has trouble with-- boundaries sometimes, but I made it very, very clear that it’s none of his business.”

Gwen sighed at the frantic assurance of it all and rolled her eyes in exasperation. 

“You know, if I had realized all the eccentricities that came along with being your friend…”

“Yeah, I know,” Peter smiled at her, a little self-effacing. “I’ll buy you veggie dumplings to make up for it.” 

*

_Dear Baby,_

_Do you really have this much of a thing for olives? Feels like a betrayal of all my sensibilities. We might have to work on that._

*

At the end of her first trimester, Gwen finally worked up enough courage and stubbornness to inform her own mother of the new Stacy on the way. 

It went about as well as she had expected, with an equal smattering of nearly-real joy and barely concealed disappointment. 

“You’re so young,” Helen Stacy said with more pity than anything. “And to do this on your own-- Gwen, did you really think this through?” 

Gwen responded once and then twice and then three times over the course of an hour that _yes, mother, I know what I’m getting into,_ even though it was partially a lie and even though she was far more scared than she permitted herself to let on.

Because doubt from her mother wasn’t going to help either of those things, and that’s all that she would get from any sort of honesty. 

So, _yes,_ she said; _I know,_ she said; _it’s all going to be okay,_ she said, and she hoped it was at least mostly true. 

*

“You actually told her?” Harry gawked at her a few days later at a cafe where Gwen got to glare at everyone with their caffeinated drinks while she drank the mildest tea on the face of the planet. “I thought you might actually wait until you had the kid in your arms.”

“I mean, I did consider that,” Gwen said. “But I figured this would win me brownie points.”

Harry grimaced at the face she made. “No such luck?” he asked. 

“Turns out I’m making the worst mistake of my life and to top it off I’m a whore,” Gwen grinned snarkily at him. 

“She didn’t call you a whore,” Harry snorted. “Helen Stacy doesn’t even know the word _whore.”_

“Might as well have,” she grumbled into her tea. 

“She’s probably just worried about you,” he tried to appease her. 

“I think she’s convinced that I’m gonna abandon this baby on her doorstep one day and she’s going to have to raise it,” Gwen laughed. “Like, she has a whole education planned out for how to make her granddaughter less of a fuck up than her actual daughter. Second chances all around!” 

“Well,” Harry held his mug up as if to toast. “To my best friend, the whore daughter.” 

“Hear, hear,” Gwen took his coffee straight out of his hand and took a long sip. 

*

She took more baths as a pregnant woman than she ever had as a not-pregnant woman. 

It was something about the way her entire body had the potential for aching and discomfort at all hours of the day and the hot water could reach every probably-ailing muscle in her stupid, swollen body at once. 

Gwen was also the horniest she had probably ever been in her life, and she had spent two years dating resident oversexed spider-guy, Peter Parker. She was horny out of her _mind,_ but she was also so very single and so very pregnant so she ended up spending far more time masturbating than had ever been necessary before. 

It was kind of a nuisance, and not one of the ones she had expected to have to face during her little _build a human from scratch_ endeavor, but it gave her something to do with her time when she would previously drink half a bottle of wine or smoke a joint by her open window, or do any of the other numerous reckless, young person things she had very suddenly given up. 

Gwen wrote a lot when she was in the bath too, setting up the breakfast-in-bed tray she’d stolen from her mother’s house years ago so it rested perilously above the water and taking pen to paper night after night. 

She had been thinking a lot about her own childhood, about how much of it she had no memory of and about how frustrating that was as someone who believed she had managed to really and truly figure out exactly who she was. 

Not only that, but she didn’t know anything about how her parents had felt during that shared time of life-- whether they had been afraid, whether they had been excited, whether they had waited with anticipation or dread or something in between for the day that she arrived. Gwen had tried to ask her mother about it once, after her father had died and she was grasping for the pieces of him that she had never been given access to, but their house had been haunted with absence and she had never gotten any of the answers she was looking for. 

So, she wrote. 

Gwen Stacy wrote about her fears and she wrote about the baby blanket she had bought at a local shop and she wrote about the way her feet hurt every single day and she made sure that neither of them would ever forget that although this path had not been one she planned for, it was still so very wanted. 

Her kid was never going to doubt how much they were loved by their mother-- even on the hard days, even on the long days, even on the days when they made her take three piss breaks in a single hour. 

Mostly, Gwen knew that she would never be able to do this thing entirely right, but that she could do it with love nevertheless. 

*

_Dear Baby,_

_I don’t know if this really counts considering you still have yet to see the outside world, but you met your Aunt MJ today. Well, maybe the more accurate way to put it is that she met you…_

*

Gwen was exhausted. 

She knew that she had been spending too much time on her feet for as far along as she was, but she also knew that her work in the lab was going to have to take a break once the baby arrived, and she wanted to get as much done before that moment came to pass as possible. 

A teenage boy offered up his seat for her on the subway, and Gwen very nearly refused out of a misplaced personal pride, but ultimately took him up on it. She spent the rest of her ride to Peter’s apartment grappling with the realization that she was getting close enough to be a full-blown mother that she even looked the part. 

It wasn’t necessarily a surprise-- she had had to go shopping for stretchier waistbands and more loose-fitting tops again just a few weeks previously-- but it was always striking. 

“Please tell me you have ice in your freezer,” Gwen said in way of hello as she stepped into Peter and Harry’s unlocked apartment. 

“Uhh-- I want to say yes but I’m also not sure and don’t want to lie to you,” Peter said, seated on the floor in front of the coffee table with his laptop open. 

_“Is that Gwen?”_ a voice from said laptop filled the room. _“Flip me around, I wanna see the glow.”_

Peter obediently lifted the laptop and pointed it at Gwen as she passed, revealing a beaming Michelle Jones. 

“Okay, one of us is glowing and it’s definitely not me,” Gwen leaned down enough to get her head in frame. “You changed your hair! It looks so good, fuck, MJ.” 

Michelle pushed her new braids over her shoulder bashfully, but there was something like giddiness in her posture even then, even in her eternal state of being unable to take a compliment. 

_“Thank you,”_ she said. 

“You’re just in time,” Peter added. “Em was about to relay us with news from the western front.” 

_“Yeah, I called Pete because usually the whole fuckin’ commune is around if he is, but he was actually home alone for once,”_ Michelle groused. 

“Okay, wait-- I’m just gonna check on that ice situation,” Gwen held up a finger, dropped her bag on the floor, and turned towards the kitchen as she continued to talk over her shoulder. “My feet are a swollen nightmare.” 

Peter and Michelle took turns offering up teasing platitudes about the joys of motherhood while Gwen filled a plastic bag with ice and wrapped it in a kitchen towel. 

“I hate the both of you with my entire heart and soul,” she said, collapsing onto the couch and placing her feet on her ice pack on the coffee table. 

“Okay,” Peter hopped up onto the couch beside her. “Time for MJ’s news.” 

_“I’m moving back to New York!”_ Michelle said brightly, sending both Gwen and Peter leaning in closer and conking heads lightly. 

“MJ!”

“Dude, what?!” Peter exclaimed. “I thought you were gonna build up to it a bit, you’re-- Like, moving back for good?”

_“Yeah, for good,”_ Michelle chuckled. _“I didn’t tell you guys because I wasn’t sure if it would pan out, but I’ve been applying to jobs in the city again and the Brooklyn Museum needs a new assistant curator, so…”_ she trailed off with a shrug. 

“When do you move?” Gwen asked. 

_“In about six weeks,”_ Michelle said. _“So, I should be around just in time to meet Baby.”_

“That’s-- Em, that’s amazing,” Peter grinned at her. 

_“It’ll be good to be home,”_ she said. _“I mean, California is nice but it’s also kind of a nightmare.”_

“Yeah, obviously,” Gwen said. “It’s _California.”_

Peter bumped her with his shoulder and Michelle laughed. Gwen grinned in spite of her swollen, swollen feet. 

*

The allotted paid maternity leave spontaneously increased in February-- three months before Gwen’s due date and with zero prompting. 

The PR people hid it well underneath a pile of housekeeping for the company, but when Gwen got called to human resources to discuss whether or not she wanted to make adjustments to her own plans for leave, she could feel the nepotism in the very floorboards of the office. 

“He knows I can take care of myself, right?” she said, out of line and far too aggressive at the door to Pepper Potts’ office. 

Pepper looked up from her computer, an amused smile already on her face as if she had known she was on her way-- she probably had, to be fair. Security was just sort of like that in this building. 

“Gwen, come on in, sit down,” she motioned for the couch off to the side, getting up from her own seat and moving to the electric kettle in the corner to start a pot boiling. 

Gwen, a stubborn ass but also deeply indebted to and respectful of Pepper Potts and all she did, went ahead and did as she was told. 

“I assume we’re talking about my husband and his flawed ways of showing affection?” Pepper said over her shoulder as she began to pour hot water over two tea bags. 

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, or that I’m not-- so grateful,” Gwen implored. “It’s only, when he does stuff like this, it-- I mean…”

“It’s like he’s doubting you,” Pepper nodded her understanding as she handed Gwen a steaming mug and sat down beside her on the couch. 

“Yeah,” Gwen sighed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have even bothered you with this, I’m all mixed up today.” 

Pepper smiled at her empathetically. 

“Growing a life will do that to you,” she said. And then, after a sip of tea, “You know, Tony and I have been together for a very long time now, and he still sometimes forgets that I’m allergic to strawberries?”

Gwen snorted. “Really?”

“All the time,” Pepper shrugged. “But when we started living together I mentioned once, sort of off-handedly, not entirely meaning it, that I had to wear winter boots in the bathroom in the morning because I had bad circulation and the tile froze me half to death, and three days later he drags me in there to show me the heated tiles he had installed while I was out of town on business. He was absolutely _giddy_ about it.”

“I… I don’t know that I’m getting it,” Gwen said sheepishly, but Pepper just smiled knowingly. 

“Tony’s scatterbrained,” she said. “And his brain moves a little too fast for him to always fit comfortably in the world, but when he sees someone he cares about dealing with something big, and he sees a way that he can make that big thing even marginally less intimidating-- he does it. Not because he doesn’t think you can handle yourself, but because he sees an opportunity to be of use and doesn’t have the capacity to see any reason why he shouldn’t take it.” 

Pepper’s story definitely didn’t remind Gwen viscerally of the way that when she made plans with Peter he was late eighty percent of the time, except for when he was the only one available to accompany her to an ultrasound, or the way he had swung to her apartment mid-patrol because he had stopped a robbery two doors down from her favorite ice cream shop and wanted to bring her a pint, or the way it took him two years to commit her birthday to memory but he’d known her due date since the moment she told him.

“Okay,” she conceded, and although she hadn’t vocalized her little epiphany, she could tell that Pepper heard it anyway. “Can I still yell at him for it?”

“Oh, of course,” Pepper waved her off. “Just as long as you let me watch.” 

“Deal.”

*

_I spent today worrying, Baby, about whether or not I will be enough for you. Good enough, strong enough, motherly enough._

_I have so much love for you, Baby, and I hope that is enough._

*

“Is Harry not here?” Gwen asked the moment Peter let her into the apartment and noticed that just he and Ned currently occupied the living room. 

“Welcome, Gwendolyne,” Peter deadpanned. “To my home. It’s so nice to have you here.”

Gwen just frowned, ignoring his teasing. 

“Where is he?” she asked. 

“Not positive,” Peter looked at her quizzically. “Probably work if I had to guess. He’s been staying late more often than not.”

“I know,” she dropped her bag and sat down next to Ned on the couch. “He’s been impossible to pin down-- I thought I might be able to catch him here.” 

“He avoiding you?” Ned asked. Gwen loved him when he lacked tact, it was her favorite brand of Ned Leeds. 

“Honestly, maybe,” she chuckled drily. 

“I would offer you a drink of commiseration, but…” Peter motioned vaguely to Gwen’s belly and she squinted at him. 

“Nice, Parker.” 

“Is it something we could help with?” Ned asked. 

“What?” Gwen looked to him, caught off guard. 

“Whatever you needed Harry for,” he explained. “Can we help?” 

There was a kindness to that offer, a love in the submission to filling someone else’s shoes. Gwen placed a hand on her belly, looked between those two men, and allowed them to give her that very love. 

“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I’m just-- I think I’m flailing.”

“A bit untethered?” 

“Not all who wander may be lost,” she laughed bitterly. “But _fuck_ if some of us aren’t.”

“Gwen you’re not _lost,”_ Peter implored. 

“Am I not?” she fired back. “Am I not about to be a single mother at twenty-three years old with no earthly idea what she’s fucking doing and who can’t even get her best friend to answer his phone?” 

“You do have some earthly idea,” Peter smiled that cock-eyed smile at her-- the sympathetic one that made her want to rip his stupid, expressive eyebrows right off of his face. “You’ve got two little brothers, Gwendy; and you’ve been reading every baby book you can get your hands on; and you’re _you._ ”

“He’s got a point,” Ned chimed in. “I mean, really, if anyone can figure this out it’s you.” 

Gwen mellowed some with the kindness of her boys in the air, but she knew they could still see the precipice she was stood upon. 

“What happened?” Ned asked, turning to face her more fully on the couch. 

“I called the father today,” she sighed. “He’s-- not thrilled with me.” 

“He’s pissed at you?” Peter snapped. “Are you kidding me?”

“I didn’t ask anything from him,” Gwen explained. “He just wishes I hadn’t kept Baby.” 

“What a prick,” Ned snorted indignantly. “Fuck him, honestly. I mean, Baby’s gonna have, what, like seven very cool uncles?”

“Plus a ton of significantly better aunts,” Peter added. 

“Exactly,” Ned said, pushing gently at Gwen’s shoulder to get a fragile smile out of her. “Talk about a village, right?”

“Right,” she nodded. 

“See, this is where the booze would usually come into play,” Peter walked over and squeezed onto the couch in between them, one arm around each of them and looking far less cool than he was pretending to be. 

“You’re at the bottom of the uncle ranking, for the record,” Gwen deadpanned. 

Peter gasped, mock offended. 

“Where am I?” Ned asked. 

“Solidly in the top two, I would say,” Gwen responded sagely. 

“Hell yeah,” Ned grinned. 

“I’m on the bottom?” Peter whined. 

“We’ve had sex-- do you want me to answer that question in front of Ned?” she quirked an eyebrow at him, watched him flush pink despite the look of indifference on his face as Ned cackled on the other end of the couch. 

Through his laughter, he said, “Yeah, you’re gonna be a great mom.”

And Gwen very nearly believed him. 

*

_We have great people on our side, Baby, I can’t wait for you to meet them._

_They’re strong and kind and dumb as rocks and they’re my family, so that means they’re going to be your family too._

_You’ll never be without an aunt or uncle to run to when I’m being a bitch._

*

Michelle moved home in April, and Gwen assisted on moving day by sitting on Michelle’s couch in the middle of the empty living room and directing the rest of them in her own gleeful little power trip. 

By the end of the day, Gwen fell asleep on the couch with her head in Michelle’s lap while the rest of them chatted joyfully and drank beer surrounded by half-unpacked boxes and bubble-wrapped frames. 

She didn’t wake up until she smelled the takeout food they had ordered. 

*

“You’re not seriously drawing me right now.”

“Dude, Gwen, of course I am,” Michelle smirked. “It’s my last chance to capture the glow before you go and pop.” 

Gwen rolled her eyes, but had actually managed to find a comfortable position in Michelle’s new-thrifted arm chair and so wasn’t going to be moving any time soon, not even in the interest of keeping that sketch from ever being finished. 

“God, don’t remind me,” she groaned instead. 

“Not looking forward to that part?” Michelle asked, teasing and sympathetic at the same time. God, Gwen had missed her. 

“I’m going to take all of the drugs they’ll give me,” Gwen said. “Maybe I’ll even bring some of my own from home to help out.” 

“Hmm, good plan,” Michelle snorted. “You want me to be there? I’d be happy to come, you know.” 

“If you happen to be off work then yeah,” Gwen said sincerely. “But I know you’re still in the first-impressions part of the job, so I’ll have Pete keep you posted and you can just come meet the new girl when you’ve got time.” 

“He’s gonna be there no matter what, right? Or Harry?” she looked up from her sketch then, serious about this. “I don’t want you to be alone for any part of it.” 

“I won’t be,” she smiled earnestly, not thinking about the fact that something was definitely up with Harry and she was almost certain it had to do with their very topic of conversation. 

Not that he wasn’t happy for her or supportive or any of those things, just because he wasn’t all that great with change and this-- a brand new person that was going to become Gwen’s entire world-- was a pretty damn big change to grapple with. 

“Should we make bets on whether or not Peter passes out?” Michelle asked. 

“Oh my God,” Gwen cackled. “What if this was just me playing the _revenge on my ex-boyfriend_ long game? Forcing him to watch me push a bloody human head out of my vagina.” 

Michelle curled in over her sketchbook with a full-bodied laugh. 

“Too much?” Gwen questioned with a delighted giggle. 

“Hey, it’s his own fault,” Michelle grinned. “The guy’s gotta stop being friends with all of his exes.”

“MJ, if he stopped being friends with his exes, he wouldn’t have any friends left!” 

It wasn’t even all that funny, but the build up of it and the way they were both on the verge of insanity-inducing exhaustion and the giddiness that came along with watching the world whip past them in technicolor blurs was enough to have them nearly in tears. 

They were young women with so much life to give and so much love-- for themselves, for each other, for the work they were doing and the people they were doing it with. 

So they laughed, and Michelle committed the moment to paper, and the world kept whipping past. 

_*_

_Dear Baby,_

_Some days I feel so infinitely young that I can’t comprehend what it will mean to teach you about the world._

_I’ll figure it out, I swear to you, but until then I have some learning of my own to do._

*

Gwen was listening to an album that Michelle had suggested to her but that Gwen was still largely on the fence about when her water broke right in the middle of a subway car. 

At first, she was mortified, convinced that she had just pissed herself in public, but then her stupid, stupid brain started to put together the pains she had been feeling off and on all day with the fact that she was but a mere week and a half out from her due date and… yeah, this was labor alright. 

“Ma’am, are you alright?” a teenage boy wearing a denim jacket over a hoodie asked, cluing Gwen into the fact that her face was definitely doing some impressive emotional gymnastics. 

“I-- uh, think my baby is coming,” she looked at the poor boy, knowing that the sudden terror in his eyes was mirrored on her own face. “I don’t have service down here, I need-- I need to get off,” she struggled to stand, holding tight to the rail to her right but ultimately falling back into her seat as the pang of a contraction hit her. 

“Um-- alright--” the boy stepped closer to her. “Are any of you doctors?” he asked the car at large, but got a lot of apologetically shaking heads in response. “Cool, great, cool-- My mom’s a nurse, but I-- I don’t--”

“Kid-- what’s your name?” Gwen asked. 

“Deshawn,” he responded hastily. 

“Hey, Deshawn,” she grimaced at him. “Think you might help me get up to street level at the next stop so I can make a call? I really do not want you to have to deliver this baby.” 

Deshawn went a little green around the gills. 

“Yes, Ma’am.” 

“You’re my hero.”

*

“Peter Benjamin Parker,” she yelled down the speaker of her phone. “If you don’t find a way to get me to a hospital in the next ten minutes I will personally drop kick you into the fucking Hudson!”

He made a choked sound on the other end of the line, and four and a half minutes later Spider-Man himself was landing in front of Gwen and a gobsmacked teenager on the sidewalk outside of a bodega. 

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Gwen groused. 

“Hello, Ma’am, you don’t happen to need a ride to the hospital do you?” Peter asked, notes of nerves in his voice that weren’t usually a part of Spider-Man’s speech patterns. 

“How’d you know?” Gwen deadpanned. 

“I’m very-- intuitive.”

“Spider-Man?” Deshawn gaped. 

“Hey, kid, I’ve got it from here,” he waved and wrapped an arm around Gwen’s middle. “Hold on tight, Ma’am.”

Gwen’s eyes got big as she realized what he was planning. 

“No chance in _Hell--”_ her tirade turned into a scream as Peter threw them into the air and swung them across the street. She instinctively wrapped her legs around his waist and held on as tight as she could, gripping at his suit as a contraction hit her mid-air. 

“Oh, fuck,” Peter muttered when he realized what was happening. 

“I swear to God, Parker,” Gwen yelled over the whipping wind. “If this baby falls out of me because of your dumbass alter ego--”

“It’s rush hour, this is our fastest option!” he defended, sounding uncertain even as he did so. 

“This is by far your most ill-advised choice of all time,” she replied. “And that’s a high fucking bar-- _shit.”_

They were both screaming when Peter landed outside the doors to the emergency room. 

*

She was too far along by the time they got there for Gwen to get any of the good drugs, but she had Peter to let her frustration out on and a very kindly doctor who let her curse as much as her heart desired and within ninety minutes, Gwen Stacy was a mother. 

*

“She’s got your-- chin.”

“What?” Gwen balked. “Her head is the size of a baseball, Peter. She doesn’t have my chin.” 

“I don’t think you’ve ever held a baseball in your life, Gwendy,” Peter laughed quietly, forearms leaning on the bed next to her hip. 

“My point is, we won’t be able to know whether she has my chin or not until she’s bigger,” Gwen said, hair curling with sweat and sticking to her forehead and the back of her neck. 

“Fair enough,” Peter lifted a finger and gently prodded at the baby’s nose, too tiny to comprehend, too real to believe. “Do you have a name yet or is she gonna be Baby Stacy forever?” 

“I have a name,” Gwen looked down at her baby, grinning through the clear exhaustion. 

Peter raised an eyebrow at her expectantly. “You gonna clue me in?”

Anticipation clung to the walls of that hospital room, had been since they’d arrived in a flurry of chaos and fear mere hours earlier. 

She’d done a lot of screaming then, but now she was awed into quiet, grinning ear to ear. 

“Maxine Gwendolyne Stacy,” she beamed. 

A bright burst of laughter tumbled out of Peter’s lungs. 

“Of course,” he smiled right back at her. “Of fucking course you would.” 

“She’s really just a bunch of my genetics rearranged, right?” Gwen shrugged. “So why shouldn’t her name reflect that?” 

“It’s perfect,” Peter responded, earnestly overjoyed at the little bundle of Gwen, rearranged fast asleep in her mother’s arms. “Hear that, Max? You’re perfect.” 

“Already with the nicknames,” Gwen tutted, halfheartedly pushing at Peter’s forehead with the palm of her hand. “Give her the chance to form a personality first.” 

“You’re telling me you’re planning to raise an honest-to-God Maxine?” Peter teased. 

“Fuck off,” Gwen said through a breath of laughter. “And to think I was going to make you Godfather.” 

Peter’s face went soft, lit up like a fucking flashbulb. 

“Are you serious?” he asked with all the sincerity available in the whole of the city. 

“I will only permit impressions from Godfather I,” she responded flatly. 

Peter pushed himself out of his little plastic hospital chair and up onto the edge of the bed. He was on the verge of tears and so full of love for these women and for once in his life excited for the type of vulnerability that went along with a love so big. Gwen could see it all, right there on his face.

“Hey, Max,” he poked at the baby’s toes. “How do you feel about severed horse heads?” 

*

Michelle came by the hospital when she got off work later that evening, Ned and Flash in tow to make sure they really filled that room in the maternity ward to capacity. 

Gwen handed the baby off to Michelle, who softened to a point that she didn’t think she had seen firsthand before. Michelle, for her own part, wouldn’t let any of the boys take the baby from her under the guise that she didn’t trust them with a newborn, but what they could all tell probably had more to do with the epiphany-like love emanating from that corner of the room. 

She called Harry. She texted him too. 

When Gwen fell asleep, she still had yet to hear back from him. It was disappointing but not unheard of for Harry to disappear off the grid for hours or even days at a time, so she wasn’t worried. 

Disappointed though, she was definitely disappointed. 

*

_Welcome to the world, Baby._

_You’ve gone and made me speechless._

*

Gwen Stacy had fallen in love all of three times in her life. 

She wasn’t stingy, she wasn’t particular with her love and she did, in fact, have a great deal more love than that to go around. But being in love? In the way where you would give your life for another or throw the moon out of orbit, manipulate the tides just for a mere smile? 

Three times. 

The first was not with a person, but with a stray cat that sometimes hung out around the home she lived in as a small child. Gwen named her Eleanore after her grandmother, because they were both old and gray and stubborn. She would leave little bowls of water and food on their front stoop when she left for the first grade each morning, and bring them inside to clean them out when she got home each afternoon. She loved that cat with every ounce of her available. 

The second was only about a year later, when she met a boy named Harry who was funny and smart and would sit and talk to her at recess while she read on the swings, even if she didn’t feel like talking back that day. He was good and he got her and he just kept getting better with each passing year that they spent side-by-side, working their way through childhood and adolescence and all the shit that came after. She loved him like a brother, only more. 

The third time didn’t come along until she was a sophomore in college and the slacker in her eight A.M. class turned out to actually be a genius, and to be charming, and to be a little bit of an idiot but funny all the same. At nineteen years old, she had never felt for anyone the way she felt about Peter Parker, which was how she knew it must have been love. Which is why when it all ended with tearful apologies and wishes that she could have handled all the self-prescribed responsibility on his shoulders, she couldn’t have left him behind altogether, couldn’t stop loving him entirely. 

She thought then, that perhaps an intense love wasn’t for her, that maybe she didn’t want to feel so _much_ about another person that she would blow up the moon, that maybe three times was enough. 

When Maxine Stacy was born, she fell in love for a fourth. 

*

Gwen didn’t sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time during her first night at home alone with the baby. Not because Max was waking her up, but because she was terrified to take her eyes off of her for too long, as if the minute she did something would go wrong. 

When Peter and Michelle swung by with food the following afternoon on their lunch hours, Gwen burst into over-exhausted tears and they forced her into a hot shower and a nap. 

Peter spent the night, sprawled out next to Gwen in her bed and acting as the personification of a night-light-- keeping the scary stories at bay. 

The next time she was alone, it was a little bit easier. And the time after that, and the time after that, too. 

*

_You’re two whole months old today, Baby!_

_I’ll be honest, I can’t wait until you outgrow the diapers, but I dread the day when I can no longer strap you to my chest and dance around the kitchen. You’re the best partner I’ve ever had._

*

“Hey, Har,” Gwen said to his voicemail box, phone clutched between her ear and shoulder while she threw a load of laundry into the machine in the basement. “Not that I miss you or anything but we should get lunch soon-- I’ll get Pete or MJ or someone to watch the kid. Call me back for once, yeah?”

*

“Is he mad at me?” she asked Peter a week later when Harry would still only respond to her with quick texts that sometimes made sense and sometimes came inexplicably at four in the morning. 

“Why would he be mad at you?” Peter asked with genuine confusion, keeping the baby preoccupied in his lap while Gwen painted her nails for the first time in months. 

“I dunno-- new baby, I haven’t had time to really check in on him as much as I would like,” she said. “I feel like something’s going on and he’s not talking to me about it because I’m, like, zero help to anyone who can feed themselves right now.” 

“I haven’t seen him much recently if I’m being honest,” Peter responded sheepishly. “Our schedules have always been kind of opposite, but I feel like he’s been at the office more in the past month or so.” 

“It scares me when he gets like this,” Gwen sighed. “It always feels like he’s about to get self destructive when he stops talking to me.”

“Want me to keep a closer eye on him?” 

“If you could,” Gwen nodded. “And tell him to fucking call me back.” 

*

_Dear Baby,_

_If the way you scream when you get hungry tells us anything, no one is ever going to get in the way of what you want._

_Keep on screaming, Baby._

_*_

It was a Thursday night. 

It was way past Maxine’s bedtime, but she was fussing so Gwen was walking around the apartment, bouncing her gently and speaking to her in low, soothing tones. 

It was a Thursday night, nearing ten o’clock, at the end of what had been a normal day, at the end of what had been a normal week. 

It was all about to blow up in her face. 

“Holy shit!” she startled, clutching Max closer to her body when she saw movement outside her living room window, only to relax at the sight of familiar red and blue. “What the fuck is wrong with you-- you scared me-- Peter?”

He practically fell straight onto his face as he came careening through the open window with far less grace than his spider genetics usually allowed for. He landed on his hands and knees and tugged his mask off with panting breaths. 

“Shit, what happened,” Gwen, still holding the baby as she lowered herself to her knees in front of him. “Shh, baby, you’re okay-- Uncle Peter’s okay too, right?”

“Gwen,” Peter finally sat back on his heels and her heart cracked just at the sight of his blood-shot eyes, the clarity of grief in every line of his tired face. 

“What happened,” she demanded, no room for fucking around if Peter looked like that on her living room floor on a regular Thursday night. 

“The Goblin is back,” he choked out. He looked at Max, reached out and ran a gloved hand over her head as tears slipped down his cheeks. 

But what he was saying didn’t make sense. Gwen knew it didn’t make sense because she knew that the Green Goblin was dead. She knew that Peter had watched him die. 

“Peter--”

“It’s Harry, Gwen,” he said bluntly.

Max wailed and Gwen stood up to resume bouncing her properly, eyes never leaving that same look on Peter’s face-- the terrible one that brought with it terrible things. 

“No,” she said. “That’s not true.”

“He found out about his dad,” Peter explained, still on the floor. “He found out about me.” 

Gwen resituated Max in her arms and lifted a hand to her mouth-- trembling, trembling every part of her with the weight of a knowledge she could not find the beginning or end or sense of. 

“He knows that you…”

“Yeah,” Peter confirmed, pushing himself to his feet unsteadily and thumbing at the fabric of his mask, looking as though he was about to put it back on and jump out her window like he hadn’t just ruined her life. 

“You can’t go home,” she said. 

“I can’t stay here,” Peter frowned at her. “You’re-- Gwen, I’m not putting the two of you in that kind of danger, I just needed you to know so you could--”

“Hide? From my best friend?” she cut him off. “Absolutely not.” 

“Something’s happened, he’s sick and he’s not your Harry right now,” Peter implored with a step towards her. “I need you to go to the Tower with Max and stay _put,_ Stacy.” 

“He wouldn’t hurt me,” Gwen shook her head. “I could talk to him-- Max, hey, please stop screaming, huh?”

“Yeah, no, we’re not taking that risk,” Peter shook his head. “Happy is already on his way to pick you up and I swear if you don’t go with him--” he cut himself off as he backed up towards the window. 

“Don’t you dare jump out that window, this conversation is not over--”

“I’m gonna help him,” Peter was practically begging her now. “I’m gonna do whatever it takes, I promise-- but I need you to be _safe._ Okay?” 

Gwen took a deep breath, considering her options. 

“Fine,” she spat. “But if I can help in any way you have to call me, Peter. I swear to God you have to call me.” 

A look of relief crossed his face right before he pulled his mask back on and hopped onto the windowsill. 

“I’ll see you later, don’t be stupid.”

“That’s my line, jackass!” she called just a beat too late as he swung away into the night sky. 

Max hiccupped and her sobs turned to sniffles. 

“Oh, so now you’ll stop crying?” Gwen ran the sleeve of her shirt over the baby’s wet cheeks. “Typical.” 

*

She got some of the details out of Happy during the drive to the Tower. 

Harry’s main issue was with Spider-Man-- with Peter-- but he was acting with so much irrationality and unpredictability and all around reckless vengefulness that people had already gotten hurt and they were trying to stop it from getting worse. 

Gwen had known Harry for as long as she could remember. He was complicated and he had struggled, but she had never known him to be violent. Even at his worst, Harry Osborn wasn’t a villain, except for the fact that apparently he was. 

She couldn’t help but think that they were all idiots, sending the very person that had gotten Harry stuck down this hole after him in the hopes that that would somehow calm him down. She knew in her heart that it wasn’t going to work, that he needed to feel safe if he was going to come back to Earth. 

Gwen also knew that there weren’t many people that made Harry feel safe, but that she was definitely one of them. 

She had a plan formulated before they’d even pulled into the parking garage beneath Avengers Tower. 

*

“Are you tracking him?” she asked the moment she was out of the elevator doors and crossing the lab to where Tony had a series of holographic screens up in front of him. 

“I’m just trying to make sure he doesn’t end up at an electrical plant like last time-- Oh,” Tony stopped talking as Gwen handed Maxine to him and dropped her baby bag at his feet. “You know, there was a time when you were intimidated by me.”

“And now I trust you enough to let you hold my daughter,” she smirked at him over her shoulder as she took up his previous post in front of various screens of vitals and GPS and such. “Karen, where’s our boy?” 

_“I will pull up the map for you.”_

“Thanks, girl.” 

“Is your mom freaking out a little bit?” Tony asked Max flatly, letting her play with the fingers of his prosthetic. “Do we need to do something about that?”

Gwen ignored him, scouring all the details available to her via Karen for a moment before pulling the pocket-sized journal she’d been carrying around lately out of the back pocket of her jeans and opening it to the first free page. 

She quickly scrawled out the address provided by Karen’s tracker and then turned on her heel. 

“Be good for Uncle Tony, yeah, baby?” she ran a hand over Max’s wispy hair and kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her little dimpled chin. They had the same chin. “I’ll be right back. I love you.”

“Stacy!” Tony called after her, unable to chase her due to the baby in his arms-- much by design. “You need to stay here, it’s not _safe--”_

“He needs my help,” Gwen said from the elevator as she stepped into the open doors. “Take care of my kid though, Stark-- I’ll know if so much as a hair is out of place.” 

Max cooed quietly, made a tiny grabby hand at her mom as the elevator doors closed and Gwen began her descent. 

*

His current location wasn’t actually all that far away, so by the time Gwen made it to the warehouse in question, they were both still there. She wasn’t too late. 

Gwen followed the path around the side of the building until she found an open door, pausing just outside of it to listen and take stock of the situation. 

Voices-- familiar, but unfamiliar in their tension. 

She didn’t step inside right away, and regretted it the moment she heard the first signs of a fight brewing, at which point she threw all caution to the wind and ran through the open door and into the open, concrete center of the warehouse. 

“Stop!” she yelled, just as the Green Goblin (it couldn’t be Harry-- look at him, it _couldn’t be Harry--)_ threw Spider-Man across the space and into a pillar, crumbling it on impact. “Stop it, Harry!”

He turned to look at her-- all ghastly green as he was and hovering on some sort of glider mechanism she had never seen before. Peter scrambled to his feet, lenses on his mask widening as he saw her standing there. 

“Gwen, get out of here--”

“Harry,” she ignored Peter’s warning. “Look at me, Har-- this isn’t you. I know you’ve been struggling and I’m sorry that I wasn’t there to help-- that I was too preoccupied to know, but this isn’t the solution, I promise.”

The Goblin sneered, head tilted to the side in a menacing, mocking manner. 

“You promise?” 

Gwen’s blood went cold at the sound of his voice-- not his voice-- that sound, coming from his lips and pretending to belong to her Harry. 

“Are you going to help me, Gwen Stacy?”

“I am,” she implored, fear in her heart not for herself but for him. “We can figure this out, we can get you help, you don’t have to feel like this--”

“Don’t I?!” he roared, all of the badgering gone from his tone and replaced by pure torment. “You knew about our friend, didn’t you? Boyfriend Petey and his little secret?”

“Harry,” Peter took a step closer. “Please--”

“Shut up!” he rushed at Peter, who managed to flip out of the way just in time. The Goblin swiveled back around to face Peter head-on. 

“It wasn’t his fault!” Gwen cried out. 

“You’re both _delusional!”_

He looked like he was about to take another shot at Peter, but stopped where he was when they heard the sound of a helicopter passing overhead. The Goblin grinned-- maniacal and frightening. 

“Ooh, looks like more friends have arrived,” he jeered. “Let’s go say hi, shall we?” 

He was up and out through an empty window frame before either of them could do anything about it, but Gwen was running towards the stairwell that would take her towards the roof the moment he disappeared out of sight. 

Peter hurried after her, grabbed her arm, pulled her to a stop, and pulled off his mask all in one frantic, jerking motion. 

“Gwen, I need you to let me handle this, I _need_ you to,” Peter begged her, mask limp in his hand and eyes wide and frantic. 

“I’m not letting you--”

“No, that’s not how this works,” he shook his head. “I know you can take care of yourself, I would never doubt that, but-- I can’t-- Gwen, I love you and I love Max too much to let you take this risk right now.” 

Gwen’s heart had escaped her ribcage a solid five minutes prior, but at that point, as Peter said those words, it seemed to have come hurtling through the air and crashed right back into her full-force. 

Her face softened. “Peter…”

“I know, yeah, definitely not the time to be having this conversation right now,” he kept barreling forward. “But I super fucking love you, I don’t think I ever really stopped, and-- and then Max came along, and I mean, I’ve never looked at a baby and thought about anything other than how, just, unbelievably messy they were, but I look at Max and…” 

Peter shook his head and at some point Gwen had lifted a hand to his cheek, warm in contrast to the cold, concrete building around them. 

“Are you, Peter Parker,” she said slowly, carefully. “Suggesting we do the whole white picket fence thing?”

“I mean, I gotta go stop your childhood best friend from destroying the city first, and hopefully calm him down enough to get him to a hospital,” Peter motioned over his shoulder. “But after that I’m-- super free, very, very available. For whatever you want.” 

“Your timing is fucking otherworldly,” Gwen pushed her bangs out of her face, and then nodded to herself. “Yeah, okay-- get out of here, and then we’ll-- yeah,” she pushed at his chest, ignoring the nauseating way that giddiness and terror were mixing in her stomach, burning her heart. 

“I’ll see you in a bit,” he pulled his mask on, backing up towards the nearest exit. “Go back to the Tower!”

With that, he was swinging up onto a balcony and out through the same window as Harry and Gwen really thought she might vomit with the weight of her love for them and fear for them and anger at them for getting her wrapped up in the middle of this at all. 

It was her fatal flaw, getting invested in other people’s problems, and she should have gone home at that point, with that knowledge. She should have gone and held her baby and watched the news like any other regular person who wasn’t personally invested in the feud of a local vigilante and super villain-- a boy who sat on the swings at recess and told the girl reading a book all of his secrets. 

She should have run away. She should have relieved herself of this responsibility. 

“Fuck,” she muttered to herself as she stormed into the stairwell and began her journey to the top. 

She should have thought it through. 

*

It was chaos when she reached the roof, but a frozen sort of chaos, a stand-off as Peter tried to incapacitate Harry just enough to get him into the helicopter and deal with whatever was in his system. 

Everything unfroze when Peter saw her, because it meant that Harry saw him turn his head and noticed her as well, and took the break in focus as a means of getting the high ground once more. 

He was sweeping her off the roof and onto his too-narrow glider, holding her tight up against him, before she could so much as duck. 

“Harry, put me down!” she demanded, unable to get her arms out of his iron grip or get purchase on any sort of stability. 

“You won’t do to me what you did to him!” Harry screamed as he took the two of them out over the edge of the roof, so many feet above the sidewalk below that it had Gwen’s stomach turning. “I won’t let you!” 

Peter ran, ran, ran to the edge of the roof closest to them, searching for a way to get her back on solid ground-- she could see it in his body language, despite the mask, despite the space between them. 

Gwen Stacy had never begged for anything in her life, but she begged Harry to come back to her. 

She begged him to come back to himself, to click his head back onto his shoulders, to stop fighting them and let them, let them, please _let them help._

Peter was screaming from the edge of the roof, and Gwen’s shoes were sliding around on the Goblin’s glider, his arm like a vise around her chest. 

“Harry, put her down!” Peter pleaded. “This is about you and me, just put her _down!”_

Something in Gwen knew that it was over the moment he said that-- not necessarily her conscious brain, but something deep in her belly could feel it. The way the world slowed down, the way the smell of her baby hit her like a train. 

When the Goblin let go of her and pushed her forward off of the glider and into open air, Gwen Stacy didn’t scream. 

She gasped a silent apology, she breathed a final wish into the world, and then, terribly and inevitably…

Impact. 

_**Fifteen years,** _

**_nine months,_ **

**_and four days_ **

**_later._ **

Maxine Stacy, five hours after she sat down with a plate of Chinese takeout and a box of worn-out journals, came flying out of her bedroom. 

“Isn’t there more?” she asked, startling Peter where he appeared to be working on a lab report on the couch. 

Her Aunt Michelle was seated next to him, curled up in the corner and reading a book. She looked up eagerly when Max appeared, and the teenager couldn’t help but wonder what she had looked like all those years ago, freshly returned from California and holding her friend’s new baby. 

“What?” Peter asked, giving her a once over glance as if checking for signs of injury. He wouldn’t find any, all of Max’s hurt was well kept inside her gut. 

She lifted up the last of her mother’s journals-- a small pocket notebook held together with an elastic band. 

“This can’t be the last one,” she demanded, voice cracking. “It doesn’t make sense.” 

Peter stood and crossed the room to her, gently taking the notebook out of her hands and turning to the last used page. Michelle sat up and set her book aside, but didn’t approach them. It was as if she knew what this conversation was going to be, knew that it wasn’t hers to dominate. 

“It’s just an address,” Max continued, the slow build of tears in her voice turning to actual tears on her face. “She wrote a whole entry about-- about nothing of importance and then just-- an address. That’s where it ends.”

When Peter met her eye there was heartbreak there, and in her overwhelmed state Max sincerely couldn’t tell who his heart was breaking for. Was it himself-- in regret for giving her this window into his past at all?

Was it for Gwendolyne Stacy and the hole she’d left in their lives?

Was it, in fact, for Max-- a child but not his child, never his child?

“Max…”

“There has to be _more_ to it than this,” Max sobbed, snatching the notebook back from Peter and using it to punctuate her point. “What does this even fucking mean?!” 

“Why don’t you both sit down?” Michelle suggested evenly. 

“No!” Max pushed back. “He knows-- Look at you, you both know so just-- just _tell me.”_

Peter sniffed, looked away for a moment as if he couldn’t bear the mere sight of her, and rubbed his palm across his mouth before he spoke again. 

“It’s where she died, Max,” he said-- simply monumental. “She wrote it down to show the taxi driver and then later that night she was-- killed there.” 

“The Green Goblin killed her,” Max said wetly, because that was the part of the story that she did know. “But she-- why did she go to this place? I looked it up and it’s just a warehouse, there would’ve been no reason…”

She didn’t remember a time when she had ever seen Peter cry quite so openly in front of her, but that’s what was happening in the moment. He was crying and he looked more pained than he had any right to. 

“Oh, kid,” he said brokenly. “She went there because she knew that’s where I was. She went there because she thought she could help.”

Max felt her face go hot, felt the blush spread across her collar bones and up her neck. 

“She went to help you,” she reiterated, low with realization and budding anger. 

“Yes,” Peter nodded once. He looked broken. Max found she didn’t care. 

“She-- she went there knowing it wasn’t safe because she wanted to help you and--” Max choked on the hitch of a sob. “And you couldn’t even keep her alive?” 

“Max,” Michelle stood up then. “It’s more complicated--”

“No, it’s not!” Max cut her off fiercely despite the tears. “My mother is dead because of you!” 

“I’m so sorry, kiddo,” Peter swiped at his face. “Can we please just talk--”

“Shut up,” Max shook her head. “You don’t get to try and parent me right now, you’re not even-- you’re not my dad.”

“I know I’m not.”

“Then stop acting like it!” Max exclaimed. “You killed my only real family!”

She turned and stormed back towards her room, ignoring any calls after her and slammed her door, locking it behind her. She knew that they had a key to come in if they really wanted to, but she also knew that they wouldn’t. 

Not after that. Not after she said all of that. 

Max curled up on her bed, still incapable of controlling her sobs. She had cried so very much in just one afternoon, in just one birthday, and she wasn’t sure how she had any water left in her body. 

“Max,” she heard Peter’s voice quietly through her door a few minutes later. “We love you very much, that’s-- I know that’s not enough right now but we love you more than anything.” 

Max ignored him. 

She had a dream about a blonde woman dancing around the kitchen with a baby strapped to her chest. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't look at me
> 
> (thoughts and feelings always welcome in the comments or i'm on tumblr @ premiere-pro)


	3. Peter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Maxine--_
> 
> _I’m so sorry._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you're all so lovely, thank you so much for your comments <3 
> 
> it's in the tags but extra warning for this chapter: mentions of a (failed) attempted suicide. it happens off-screen and neither methods nor details are discussed, just the conversations that happen in the aftermath.

When Max woke up, eyes aching and throat inflamed, the alarm clock on her bedside table was blinking _four o’clock._ She still had two hours before she had to get up and get ready for school, but she didn’t much feel like going back to sleep. 

The box that Peter had brought into her room the night before sat empty on its side a few feet away from her bed, journals strewn about it after her frantic search for the missing piece-- some sort of goodbye, some sort of final lesson or wisdom or love from her mother. 

It hadn’t been there, because of course it hadn’t, because Gwen Stacy hadn’t left her apartment that night expecting to die. But in the mere hours that Max had known about her mother’s journals, she had built up this story for herself, this version of reality in which she got a proper letter with instructions on who she was meant to be, how she was meant to carry on the legacy of a woman long dead. 

Instead, she’d gotten an abrupt ending and fewer journals than she had been counting on, because when she went through the box-- again and again, searching, searching-- she had realized that most of them were in Peter’s handwriting. 

Most of them were in Peter’s writing because her mother had only spent about a year with Max in total from conception to death. 

Slipping out of bed and taking her comforter with her as she sat down on the floor, Max began to more neatly sort out Gwen’s journals, stacking them and placing them gently back in their box. There was a lot of honesty in those pages, more than Max had been prepared for, but it was the most viscerally she had ever felt her mother’s presence, and just running her hands over the covers made her skin buzz with unmet potential. 

Max made sure that all of Gwen’s pages were safely kept, and then turned her focus to the toppling piles of everything left. These ones were a bit messier-- fatter with pasted-in photographs and what looked to be other slips of paper, ticket stubs-- she thought she even saw a crayon drawing poking out of the side of one. 

Like Gwen’s they were labeled by date, so Max collated them into the proper order. Slowly, meticulously, vacillating all the while on whether or not she was too angry to read them or just angry enough.

_Four- thirteen,_ the clock blinked on her bedside table. 

She cracked open the earliest of Peter’s journals and turned to the first page, sternum pulling in towards her spine as she caved in on herself ever so slightly. The entry before her wasn’t dated, was but one sentence at the top of the page in uneven lettering. 

_Maxine--_

_I’m so sorry._

She turned the page. 

_**Fifteen years,** _

**_eight months,_ **

**_and three days_ **

**_earlier._ **

“Oh sweetheart.”

Those were May’s first words to him on that sunny spring morning, stepping through the door and into his Queens apartment, into the chaos that was Peter Parker’s life. 

“We’re running a little behind this morning,” Peter said, bouncing the baby on his hip and doing everything he could not to burst into tears from pure exhaustion. 

“Here, give me Maxine,” she said as she was already reaching out and prying the distraught baby from Peter’s arms. “That’s okay, here we go. Aunt May’s got you, baby.”

Peter held out his hands with an awkward sort of cautiousness as May tucked baby Max against her chest, rocking her gently. He couldn’t make his feet move, couldn’t step away, simply had forgotten how to exist in a room without this child. 

“She-- she-- I don’t know what I did, she just won’t stop screaming,” Peter choked out with trembling hands. It was a lie, he knew what he had done, he knew why the motherless child was wailing with a pain she was too young to understand. 

“Peter, I’ve got her, it’s okay,” May assured him. “Go wash your face and get dressed. Happy’s got the car downstairs.” 

“Okay. Okay,” Peter scrubbed a hand over his face with a harsh breath. “I’ll be right back.” 

He could hear from the bathroom as May managed to calm Max down and he could hear her singing softly as he did up his shirt with still-shaking hands and caught sight of himself in the mirror, terrified and sleep deprived and _sad._

_“You look like shit, Parker,” she told him. “That’s supposed to be my thing now. I mean have you read any of this pregnancy book yet?”_

_“Yeah, your body is about to be a fucking battlefield Gwendy,” he laughed. “Like, I thought it was bad when I got bit by a radioactive spider, but you? You’ve got quite the storm coming.”_

_“I’m glowing, motherfucker,” she chucked the book at his chest and he didn’t bother to try to catch it._

“Peter, are you almost ready?”

“Yeah-- Yeah, May,” he took one last look in the mirror, grabbed his wallet, and walked out to meet her. 

*

The drive into Midtown was quiet. 

Happy had initially tried to offer a quiet _how are you holding up_ only to receive a non-answer of a noise as Peter buckled Max into her carrier with numb hands. 

Blossoms were blooming on the trees and and the sky was a clear blue and Peter wished they were actually living inside the terrarium that the city had come to look like so he could drive his elbow into the glass, shatter it, reveal the dim reality of the world outside this surreal bubble. 

Because there was no way the sky could be _that blue_ on the day of Gwen Stacy’s funeral. 

It simply didn’t make any sense. 

*

Tony, Pepper, and Morgan were waiting for them outside the church when they arrived. 

“Let me take her for the service,” Tony said under his breath, hand on Peter’s shoulder where he was tense with how tight he clutched onto Max. Peter shook his head. “Kid--”

“I’ve got her,” he said, but he didn’t move to walk up the steps to the front entrance, barely even registered that the rest of their family was already making their way inside, leaving Tony on _distraught Peter duty._

Tony let out a slow, sympathetic breath and wrapped an arm around Peter’s shoulders. 

“Alright,” he conceded. “Let’s go find our seats then, yeah?”

*

Peter didn’t remember much about his parent’s funeral. 

Most of the stand-out moments from that day were the tantrum he had thrown when Ben had been trying to get him dressed and the way their apartment had smelled after the little memorial they’d thrown after the service. Someone had brought them a casserole that Peter could still smell sometimes at twenty-three years old. 

The rest of that day existed in his memory as a faded blur of crying strangers trying to hug him, soothe him, put their less-than-comforting hands on him as they apologized for his loss. Looking back on it, the thing they ought to have been apologizing for was the way they took up all the space for grief in the room and didn’t leave any for the little boy with his shirt buttoned wrong. 

Ben’s funeral had been the same and different. Peter was older and thus more present in the moment, putting all of his available energy into protecting May from the very same vultures that stuck in the mental flipbook of his childhood like some sort of trauma index. 

This funeral, Gwen’s funeral, was entirely new.

Peter had felt the loss of his people before, had felt the impact that loss had on both himself as well as the world at large, but he had never felt like something was being taken away from him personally, intentionally. 

On that day, sitting in between May and Tony with a sleeping baby clutched to his chest, Peter felt like something was being _taken away_ from him. 

A person, yes, but also a possibility. An entire unlived life. 

“You’re the father?” one funeral-goer asked sympathetically. 

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” said another, with a sidelong glance across the room towards Helen Stacy. 

“Time to go,” Happy said, stepping in between Peter and someone who had their eyes locked on him. 

“I should-- I haven’t spoken to Helen,” Peter tried to step past, but Happy placed both hands on Peter’s shoulders and turned him around. It was, perhaps, easier to bodily move him than it should have been. 

“We’ll see her at the reception,” Happy said. “No reason you have to stand through this bullshit.” 

He led Peter back to the car. Peter let him. 

*

_Maxine--_

_Your life was supposed to be different from this._

*

Peter had visited the Stacy household on only a handful of occasions during the time that he and Gwen were actually together. 

Being back inside of it, sitting at that uncomfortable wooden chair in the kitchen while he fed Max, was deeply unpleasant in ways he simply did not want to put names to. It was the familiarity, it was the nostalgia, it was the hopefulness of a new relationship all run dry. 

Max started crying. 

“Fuck,” Peter muttered, although mostly he was jealous. He’d really liked to have been screaming too. “Max, kiddo, please not today,” he begged quietly as he held her at his shoulder and tried to burp her to no avail. 

He closed his eyes and thanked whatever fucked up sort of God presided over his life that the kitchen was empty for the time being, rocking a miserable baby that he had no right to comfort, only the responsibility to. 

“Alright,” Tony appeared at his side and tapped Max’s back a couple of times until she spit up onto the rag on Peter’s shoulder. “There you go, Miss Maxine. Better, huh?” 

“Tony…”

“You’re flailing kiddo,” he said, not unkindly. “Please tell me you’ve accomplished what you need to here so we can take you home?” 

“Have to talk to Helen,” Peter said, propping himself up against the sink. “I swear the woman’s avoiding me. I mean, I don’t blame her, but fuck.” 

“Can I take the baby, then?” Tony asked. “So you can make that happen and we can go get some food in you somewhere that’s not… here?” 

Peter held onto a now quieter, more content Max with a bit more force at the suggestion that he give her up. His feelings about that child were conflicting and painfully contradictory on a minute-to-minute basis, but he didn’t have the energy to explore his own internal conflicts at the moment so he just-- held the baby tighter. 

“Oh, there you guys are.”

“Rhodey, take the baby from him,” Tony ordered. 

“On it.” 

“Hey-- hold on, I am not above physically assaulting either one of you--”

“Peter Parker, you gotta let someone--”

“I’ve got this one, Tones.”

Tony gave Rhodey a curious look, but left them to their own devices with a breath and a shake of his head. 

“The tag teaming is a nice touch,” Peter said. “Really, whoever’s choreographing you guys these days deserves a-- a Tony. The award, not the asshole.” 

“If you think I became Tony Stark’s best friend without learning how to detect deflection then you maybe didn’t earn a few of your degrees,” Rhodey deadpanned. “Calling me stupid? On the day of my not-girlfriend’s funeral?”

“Peter, stop,” he said with careful ferocity. “The balcony’s open so you’re gonna go get some fresh air, okay? And I’m gonna hang out with my niece, and it’s all gonna be fine.” 

The painful thing was that he was right. 

Peter really did need to get out of that room and away from those people who didn’t understand his relationship to their daughter and friend, who didn’t want him to have custody of this baby, who thought they knew Gwendolyne Stacy but really had no clue what she wanted out of her life. _(Not this, not this, not this.)_

“When did I become a teenager again?” Peter asked, still mostly sounding worn rough despite the teasing nature of his words. “All of you thinking you can just tell me what to do.”

Rhodey smiled that melancholy smile. “You’ll always be fourteen to us-- get used to it, kid,” he said, scooting forward as Peter adjusted Max in his arms to hand her over. “I got her,” he promised. 

“If she starts getting restless come find me,” Peter watched intently as Rhodey supported the baby’s head. 

“If she starts getting restless I’ll either handle it or find May,” Rhodey responded flatly. “Go take a breather and don’t come back until you’re ready.” 

“I hate you,” Peter said, pushing up onto sore feet and unsteady legs. “Come _find_ me.” 

“Sure thing,” he lied. 

Peter went and got himself a drink. 

*

The balcony was small, but it had a concrete ledge for Peter to rest his drink on while he looked out over the city, summer breeze blowing through the curls on his head that could really use a good wash. 

He wasn’t sure that the fresh air was helping as much as Rhodey and Tony had been counting on, but at least he didn’t have to talk to anyone out there, at least he could breathe without pissing someone off. 

The glass door slid open. 

At least he’d had five minutes of that, anyway. 

“Peter?”

A hesitant voice, nervous, but so deeply familiar he could feel it grounding the balls of his feet to the concrete of the balcony. He turned around. 

“Hey,” he breathed out in quiet surprise. “I didn’t… Have you been here the whole time?” 

Michelle Jones, grief-stricken but standing tall, crossed her arms and looked down at her shoes. 

“Yeah,” she said sheepishly. “I would’ve said hi sooner I just-- With your family and all-- I didn’t want to intrude.”

“Em, you could never,” he said sincerely, if still a little bit in shock. 

She nodded, but he could see the conflicted sorrow and warm nostalgia that he felt in his chest mirrored on her face. It had been two weeks since they had spoken. Well, it had been two weeks since he had answered any of the numerous calls and text messages coming from her, from Ned, from Flash. 

He hadn’t even answered his door when they came knocking, hiding in his room and eventually taking the baby and going to stay with May for a few days. Peter had never been one for running away, but the option had been seeming more and more appealing with each passing day. 

“Can I hug you?” Michelle asked, a slight wobble to her jaw as she looked at him with an empathy that had been missing from the entire day thus far. 

Peter, broken that he was, clenched his jaw in an effort to hide how much he really did _want_ that and simply nodded. Once, twice, and then Michelle’s arms were around him and her chin was resting on his shoulder. 

“I’m so sorry, Peter,” she said quietly into the space right behind his ear, and for the first time in weeks, the phrasing didn’t inspire visceral anger in his heart. 

He pulled away and scrubbed at his face, letting tears smear down his cheeks as he tried to gather himself because it was, quite frankly, too much. His life in general, Michelle Jones specifically. 

“Thanks,” he cleared his throat to try and clear the bubble of too-big emotion lodged in there. “It’s-- God, it’s good to see you.” 

Michelle tucked her hands into the pockets of her jacket. 

“Could’ve seen me sooner,” she said, not trying to fight with him, just sincerely trying to remind him of that option. “Any of us. The boys are really worried.” 

“Yeah, I-- I’m sorry, it’s just been--” he shook his head. “I’m moving out of-- the old place--” _his and Harry’s place._ “And trying to get-- get Max settled into a routine?” 

“I know,” she pressed a hand into his bicep, holding on tight as if trying to prove to him her existence. “But we can help with that stuff, alright? Don’t shut us out.”

Peter laughed through a sniffle as he swiped the edge of his wrist under his nose. 

_Michelle Jones._

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he nodded. 

“Don’t just say it, Peter,” Michelle ducked her head to meet his eye. “I’m serious.”

He took a deep breath and met her sincerity with sincerity. 

“I know you are,” he said. “I’m gonna do better.”

It was a promise he had no right to make, although it felt as though no promise really was at that point. Not with the inevitability of his let-downs, his failures to everyone who shared their life with him. 

If he had believed in curses, Peter would’ve been certain that he was cursed. 

“Thank you,” Michelle responded as she stepped back, eyes roaming across his entire being in an act of observation that had not faded with age. 

A beat passed in which neither of them really breathed, because as casual a conversation as they were having, nothing about the situation at hand was casual. So they breathed, and Peter listened to the sounds of people on the street below them, and he marveled once more at the blueness of the sky. 

“Listen, Peter--”

“Hey,” Rhodey appeared at the door and Michelle took an instinctive step backwards away from the two of them, but Peter was mostly focused on the fact that Rhodey was no longer carrying the baby. “Helen is looking for you, Pete.” 

“Where’s Max?” 

“With four very capable adults,” Rhodey said flatly. “You think I’m just gonna leave your baby wherever I feel like…? Hey, Michelle, I didn’t see you at the church,” he softened at the sight of her. 

“Yeah,” she breathed. “I was at the back.”

Peter couldn’t handle it, he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t stand there and look at her and be the person he was now right out in the open where she could see and judge and recontextualize him. So he fled. 

“I have to-- Helen’s in the kitchen?” he pushed past Rhodey towards the door. 

“Yeah, she’s--”

He didn’t bother to let him finish before he was back inside the apartment and sliding the door shut behind him. 

*

“I don’t understand why you have to make this more difficult than it already is, Peter.”

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” he sighed, leaned up against the kitchen sink because at that point, it felt like the only thing keeping him from face planting on the tile. “I promise, Missus Stacy, I’m really not.” 

“You are not that baby’s father,” Helen pressed, harsh and broken and coming undone. “You are in no way her family, and I will not stand by and let you steal her from me.”

“I really don’t want to fight you at your daughter’s funeral, Missus Stacy,” Peter said, the picture of downtrodden with a hand through his hair and the other in his pocket. 

He could have brought up the question of which one of them had been there when Max was born, or which one of them had stayed up with Gwen when she couldn’t get Max to latch, or which one of them knew which of the baby food options Max hated. He could have, but he didn’t. 

“Then stop acting like you have any ground to stand on with this,” she responded, that fierceness that she passed on to Gwen accompanied by too much heartbreak for Peter to bear. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into-- You can’t…”

She trailed off with a noise of frustration. 

In that moment, he almost wanted to just give her what she was asking for. He wanted to be done with the dramatics of it all, he wanted to be left to mourn in peace without having to prove he was qualified for something he was certainly not qualified for on top of it. 

He wanted his job to be supporting Gwen while she supported her baby, but those weren’t the cards he was dealt. 

“I _can_ do this,” Peter lied. “You have a right to know your granddaughter and I won’t keep you from that, but this is how Gwen wanted it, she-- I mean, she went through the work of drafting a will, I feel like we have to respect that.” 

That heartbroken woman studied him with the sort of contempt born from hurt. 

“I give you a month,” she said, turned, and left him standing alone once more. 

He sunk into the closest chair. He wasn’t sure whether or not he could take that bet in good conscience. 

*

Maybe it was his stubborn side, the one he shared with May and the one that had made Gwen break up with him in the first place, that kept him from asking for help for much longer than he should have. 

Peter was, quite frankly, breaking under the pressure and only exacerbating the problem by trying to mend the cracks with his own two hands. 

He didn’t know enough about babies to feel confident that he wasn’t on the verge of killing another Stacy, so he read the books he had found in Gwen’s apartment when they cleaned it out instead of sleeping, and he modified the _sleep when they’re sleeping_ rule to fit his own situation a bit more accurately and only let himself cry if Max was already crying. 

Two weeks after the funeral, when Peter had broken every promise he had made about answering his phone and letting his family help and not running himself straight into the ground, he finally hit his breaking point. 

Max was crying-- she had been crying or screaming or something in between for approximately three hours, maybe ten, and Peter hadn’t showered in approximately six days, maybe a month, and he was cracking. 

“Kid, please, I am begging you,” he cried as he rocked the baby and paced the length of his new apartment. “I don’t know how to help you-- I don’t-- know what you need--”

Max cut him off with a piercing wail and Peter choked on a sob of his own. He was out of his depth and getting deeper all the time. 

He hadn’t slept and he was probably dehydrated and he couldn’t really register what he smelled like anymore but he knew in his heart he needed to take a shower and--

Peter picked up his phone, dialed before he could second guess himself because he didn’t have any right to be reaching out after weeks of dodging calls and breaking promises, but he felt like he was about to properly implode and he didn’t know what other option he had left. 

“Peter?” her voice was surprised on the other end of the line, hopeful even, until he sobbed and the worry creeped in. “Peter, what’s going on?”

“I’m sorry-- I’m so sorry, I just--” he closed his eyes and bounced Max on his hip and tried not to collapse in the middle of his living room. “Max won’t stop crying and I don’t know-- I can’t calm her down. I’m so fucking _tired_ , MJ and I don’t know what to-- what to do--”

“Alright, I hear you,” she said. “I’ll be there in fifteen, okay? Just keep breathing for fifteen minutes and we’ll figure it out together.” 

Peter, overwhelmed by the mere promise of her presence, the tone of her voice, let his knees give out as he sat down on the couch, baby in his lap. 

“Pete, I need verbal confirmation that you’ll be okay if I hang up,” she said. “I have to get on the subway, but I need to know I don’t need to call an ambulance for you first or something.” 

“Yeah, no, I’m okay,” he said in between hiccuping breaths as he tried to get control over his lungs once more. “I’m-- I’m fine. Thank you-- I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll be there soon,” Michelle said certainly. “Just keep breathing.” 

*

The moment that he had the door open for her, Michelle was taking Max into the crook of her arm and pushing Peter with her free hand. 

“Hey, baby girl,” she said gently as she kicked the door shut with her foot. “You’re having a tough day, huh?”

“Em--”

“Go take a hot shower,” she ordered, and he realized she had been pushing him towards the bathroom. He didn’t have the energy to keep his feet steady and was forced to follow her lead. “You’ve been listening to this for too long, so you’re gonna take a break and let me take care of her for a minute.” 

He stumbled backwards into the bathroom, her name on his lips as she shushed him. 

“Wash your face,” she said, and then closed the door. 

Peter could still hear Max crying, but less so when he turned on the shower, and even less than that when he finally ducked his head under the warm water, hands braced against the tiled wall as he let the pounding beat of the stream teach his heart how to beat properly again. 

Even as his muscles relaxed, he was still hyper aware of the fact that he hadn’t let Max out of his sight for more than a few minutes at a time since she had come into his care. He remembered that Gwen had pulled an all-nighter on her first full night alone at home with the baby, and he hadn’t quite understood it then, the urge to watch her tiny little lungs continue to work with each passing second, to know for certain that she was okay. 

He hadn’t understood the fear of being solely responsible for a life so new and so untested in the world, but he did now. Because as much as he would never forgive himself for what happened to Gwen, as much blame as he continued to carry on his own two shoulders day in and day out, he also knew deep in the trenches of his brain that she had decided three times over to ignore his warnings and come chasing after the fight. That had been her choice, and she had had the right to make it. 

But Max? Peter was responsible for her safety, plain and simple. She was too small to make decisions for herself yet, too brand-new to understand more than the simple goodness or badness of how she was feeling at any given moment, and if anything were to ever happen to her Peter knew he would not survive it. 

So he washed his face, and changed his clothes, and got back to work. 

Michelle was plating two bowls of pasta when he walked into the kitchen, sleeves rolled up to her elbows and braids tied up into a ponytail. She didn’t have the baby with her-- Peter couldn’t hear the baby crying--

“She’s asleep,” Michelle said as she sat down with both bowls at the kitchen table and tapped the back of the chair next to her with a fingernail. “Eat before you keel over.” 

Peter sat down beside her, gobsmacked and in awe and maybe not entirely inside his body. 

“You didn’t have to do all this,” he said, noticing for the first time how she wasn’t quite looking him in the eye. 

“Yeah, well, you didn’t have to avoid my phone calls for weeks on end but we’re both gonna just do whatever the fuck we want, I guess,” she responded flatly before taking a big bite from her bowl. 

Ah, she was pissed. That made sense. 

“MJ, I--”

“Please don’t apologize to me,” she sighed, some of the harshness leaving her voice. “It’ll just make me feel shitty for being mad at you.” 

“You kind of have a right to be mad at me.”

Michelle looked at him with those eyes that always appeared when she wanted him to stop with the self-flagellation. 

“Eat your food,” she said, and Peter didn’t have it in him to go against a direct order so he did as he was told. 

They ate quietly and Peter basked in it, the sound of the world minus an actively miserable baby. He was weighed down with exhaustion, but at the very least it was keeping him from jumping out of his chair every three and a half minutes to make sure said baby was in fact still safely sleeping in the crib beside his bed. 

Michelle joined him at the sink when he started to wash the dishes, drying them before putting them back where she had found them. 

“We’re all hurting you know,” she said eventually, breaking their mutual silence. “You’re not the only one coping with this shit.”

Peter released a breath of guilt. “I know,” he said. 

“I mean, I know it’s different for you,” Michelle continued. “I get that, but if you’re not going to ask for help for your sake then you can at least do it for ours. You and Max are family and not being able to see you during all of this is-- it fucking sucks, Parker, just so you fucking know.”

She reached for the bowl in his hands as she finished her tirade, but he held it out of her reach, didn’t let her take it until she looked up at his face and met his eye. 

“I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. “You’re right and I’m sorry.” 

“I know you are,” she replied. “Just-- please, do better. Try.” 

“I will,” he promised her. He would, he promised himself. 

*

_Max--_

_My life has always kind of been a mess, and it’s always been kind of rough around the edges, and if you were old enough to form memories you would know that already, but I think maybe you’re the universe’s way of making it up to me._

_*_

Six months after Gwen died, Peter Parker felt like a parent for the first time. 

He was sitting on the floor next to Max’s little play mat, working on schematics for some changes he wanted to make to his suit’s current OS, when he looked up to notice that she was gone. 

It took a fraction of a second for his heart to be thrumming impossibly fast in his throat, for his brain to stumble into circles of _no, no, please, I can’t do this again, no--_

“ _Max?!”_ Peter threw himself up off of the floor, dropping the tablet in his hands with a clatter and scanning the room to no avail. 

She was gone, she was gone, she was-- behind the couch?

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he stumbled around the corner and fell to his knees in front of her, pulling her into his arms to check for injuries but she just gurgled happily up at him. “How’d you do that? You a mutant? A teleporting baby would be just my luck.” 

Max batted at his face with her little fists as he carried her back to her mat and sat the both of them back down on the floor. 

“Yes, you’re very cute,” he said. “But how the fuck did you--”

The minute she was back down on the mat she was crawling away from him-- slow and uncoordinated and stopping every few inches, but crawling nonetheless. 

“Dude,” Peter’s eyes got wide as he watched her in awe. “Holy shit-- Holy--”

He lunged across the room and grabbed his phone, immediately dialing in a video call and waiting restlessly as it rang through. 

“Peter, hey sweetheart--”

“She’s doing something new!” he exclaimed giddily over May’s greeting and flipping the camera to face Max who had just sat back down on her butt with a huff. “Max, hey, can you come here and say hi to Auntie May?” he sat down a few feet in front of her, but she just babbled happily at him. 

“What’s going on?” May asked with a laugh. 

“She was just crawling,” Peter said, barely holding his excitement in. “I swear, she was just crawling around like it was nothing, but now that she has an audience-- Maxine, baby, come on you’re making me look crazy.” 

“You _are_ crazy,” May teased, but something about that seemed to work for Max, who pushed herself up on all fours and scooted a few inches closer on her hands and knees, paused, and then kept coming with a bit more confidence. 

“There she goes!” Peter cried out joyfully. “Look at that, you little mover!”

“Oh, she’s getting so big,” May gushed, grinning wildly on Peter’s screen. “You better record some of this so I can show it to Happy later-- He’ll never admit it but he lives for baby Max updates.” 

“I’ll record some after we hang up but you can’t sell the footage,” he teased. “My kid may be a prodigy but I want her to have a regular life, I want her to be humble about it, y’know?”

May’s smile somehow got broader and softer all at the same time, and he wasn’t sure what he had said to garner that sort of response because he was too caught up in the way Max had crawled directly into his lap and made herself comfortable there pulling at the buttons of his wrinkled work shirt. 

“Of course,” May said. “Whatever you want, Uncle Peter.” 

And for the first time, it felt like an endearment instead of a sentencing. 

*

_Max--_

_I’ve been worried lately that I’m not gonna be fit to teach you the difference between right and wrong, because sometimes I’m not sure that even I know. We’ve got some good people to help us out with that though. That can be enough, right?_

*

Peter bought a car. 

It was a clunker that he had to take to Tony’s garage and on which he had to spend a full month doing repairs, but it was his. He had been saving up for this thing since months before Max had been born, and when he was done with it, it had adequate trunk space for all the numerous baby things he had to carry around with him, a safely and properly installed car seat in the back, and a really killer radio. 

It was easier, not having to take a baby on the subway with him when he went to drop her off with any member of her village of babysitters, and it also gave him someplace to cry on his lunch break when it was all getting to be too much. 

Plus, it meant he didn’t have to ask anyone for a ride when he needed to make a trip to the Compound. 

“Oh, look who's here,” Rhodey grinned, coming out and around from the side of the breakfast bar. “Hey there, Maxi-Pad.”

Peter made a face. “A lifetime of friendship with Tony has really rotted your brain, huh?”

“Shut up, she loves me,” Rhodey said without breaking his smile as he gently extricated Max from Peter’s arms and held her up in front of him, making silly faces to get her to giggle. 

“Hey, if you want some baby time, would you maybe mind watching her for a few minutes?” Peter asked, restless on his feet to the point where Rhodey immediately tucked Max against his side and gave him a once-over. 

“What’re you here for, anyways?” he asked skeptically. 

“I…” Peter considered lying for two and a half seconds before thinking better of it. “I’m looking for Doctor Cho.”

Rhodey didn’t look surprised, but he did look almost hesitant. “Kid…”

“She said he’s been having more moments of lucidity lately,” he hurried to explain. “So I thought it might be a good time to-- to visit.”

“I don’t know, Pete,” Rhodey shook his head. “Last time--”

“Was way too soon, you’re absolutely right,” Peter conceded. “But he’s calmer now and-- I just want to-- see him.”

Rhodey chewed on his words while Max chewed on her own fingers, and then he exhaled slowly. 

“I feel like I’m the last line of defense and I’m supposed to stop you from doing this.”

“I mean,” Peter shrugged. “You’re welcome to try.” 

Rhodey made a long-suffering sound at the back of his throat before holding out his non-baby hand and motioning for the baby bag. 

“Alright, hand it over,” he said. 

“Thank you,” Peter said, already backing up towards the elevator once Rhodey had the bag in hand. “I’ll be right back, I promise-- thank you.”

“You’ve got twenty minutes then I’m calling whichever Parker or Stark I think will yell at you loudest for this,” Rhodey called after him. 

“Yep, got it!” Peter slid into the elevator, listening as Rhodey muttered something about _your crazy Uncle Peter_ to Max as the doors glided closed. 

*

Harry Osborn was going to be okay, of this Peter was certain. 

He had to be certain, because any other outcome was not a viable option for him, and any other outcome could very well be the final straw that sent Peter’s spine crumbling in on itself. 

So Peter could hate Harry Osborn, and he could also be angry with him, and he could also have empathy for him and be scared for him and still, still certain that he would be okay. 

The first time Peter had come to visit, about a month after Gwen’s funeral when he was starting to step out of the world once more and trying against all realistic belief to catch his sea legs as the legal guardian to a baby, Harry had been far from lucid. The synthesized serum that he had been dosing himself with was technically out of his system but had done a real number on his brain chemistry after months of use. 

So, Harry had seen Peter and immediately gone into a raging fit-- throwing things and lashing out at nurses and trying to hurt anyone and everyone including himself until Peter was able to hold him in one spot long enough for Doctor Cho to sedate him. 

It took him seven months to come back again, but here he was, trying to convince Cho to let him into the ward where Harry was being kept under close observation while he got treatment from a psychiatric expert who also happened to have a lot of experience with addicts. 

“You said-- On the phone yesterday you said he was doing better,” Peter chased after her down the hall of the medbay while she typed something into her tablet. 

“Yes, but I didn’t say he was ready for visitors,” she said. 

They came to a stop at the nurse’s station and everyone in the vicinity was doing a mediocre job at pretending not to eavesdrop on the most interesting case they’d had in a long time. 

“Is he lucid today?” Peter asked bluntly. “Right now-- I know you know-- is he lucid?”

Cho pursed her lips, took a deep breath, and then finally looked him in the eye. 

“Yes,” she said. “He is.” 

“Then give me five minutes,” Peter begged. “Just-- Isn’t it important for his recovery that he knows there are people who support him? Outside of his fucking medical staff?” 

“He knows that you call, Peter,” she assured him. “He knows that you care.” 

“Please,” he implored. 

Cho didn’t say no. 

*

They had been keeping him in a private room in the ICU, away from other patients and with twenty-four hour staff coverage nearby in case something was to go wrong. It was an unprecedented case after all, they could never be entirely positive what to expect. 

Harry was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, book in hand and wearing plain gray sweats when Peter walked in. He almost looked comfortable there, normal, until he saw Peter and his entire posture changed. 

Defensive. Angry. Tense. 

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, book closed over a thumb marking his place. As if he wasn’t planning on this visit lasting very long. 

“Hey, Har,” Peter tucked his hands into his pockets to hide the way he was trembling with too-high emotions. “You look good.”

Harry snorted. 

“What do you want?” he asked tersely. 

“I just-- I wanted to check in,” Peter tried to hold himself steady, tried to bridge the length of room between them, the miles and miles of unbreakable space. “Everyone is-- We wanted to see how you were doing. We want you to get better.”

“Well, you saw me,” Harry shrugged. “You can head out now.”

“Harry--”

“We’re not friends, Parker,” he cut Peter off. “You don’t have to do all-- _this._ Just go back to your life, alright? Go raise the baby whose mother I murdered and stop pretending like I’m salvageable.” 

Peter bristled. “You weren’t you.”

Harry bit out a harsh laugh. 

“Oh, come on, you can barely even look at me right now and you think you can convince either one of us that you don’t hate my fucking guts?” he challenged. “Get a grip.” 

Good advice, Peter thought, as his heart tumbled down the rungs of his ribs and landed somewhere in his gut. He didn’t have a good response to Harry’s tirade, and they both knew it. 

He couldn’t deny that looking at Harry made him sick to his stomach because he didn’t know how to cope with the dichotomy of Harry and the Goblin-- Gwen’s best friend and the monster who killed her. 

“Get out of here, Parker,” Harry sighed when Peter was quiet for a beat too long. 

“I really do want you to get better,” Peter responded, hand on the doorknob. It was the only truly honest thing he could think to say. 

“I know you do, you prick.”

Peter left. 

*

He picked up Max from where Rhodey was reading her a book on the floor the minute he made it back to the common room, held her close and breathed her in. 

“You okay?” Rhodey asked, already knowing the answer. 

“Yeah,” Peter lied before putting on a grin for Max. “We’re great, right Max?” 

It had been well over twenty minutes and Rhodey didn’t seem to have tattled on him, and for that he was grateful, but he also needed to get out of that place so he started abruptly packing up the baby bag once more. 

“Kid--”

“Thanks for watching her, Rhodey,” he cut off any line of questioning that could go along with that soft tone of voice. 

Rhodey didn’t try to stop him from leaving, but he thought maybe that phone call he had promised to make was probably happening after all. 

*

“Can you at least warn someone ahead of time before you go and do something stupid,” Tony reprimanded him later that night after Peter had put Max to bed. 

“It wasn’t stupid,” Peter said, not defensive so much as knowing. 

Tony sighed. “All I’m saying is you won’t always be able to take care of him and yourself at the same time. And when you can’t, I want you to try something crazy called _choosing yourself.”_

“Sure,” Peter lied. 

“Thank you,” Tony pretended to believe him. 

*

_Max--_

_There’s gonna be bad. We’re Parkers and Stacys and there’s always gonna be bad, but I can promise you that the bad will be bracketed with good._

_Or at least I hope I can._

*

“Ba-ha-phh,” Max babbled as Michelle bounced her gently. 

Michelle’s apartment was kind of a study in disaster zones after just an afternoon with the little troublemaker, but she hadn’t seemed to mind when Peter crawled through the window in need of her first aid kit and a cup of coffee. 

Now, dressed in the fresh set of clothes he’d started keeping in Max’s baby bag and feet propped up on the coffee table to dodge the talons of Lucky the cat, he was maybe too tired to be discussing a child’s birthday party. 

“It doesn’t have to be some big thing,” Michelle said. “It just-- I mean she’s got a lot of people that wanna celebrate her. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that.” 

“I can’t throw a party without her actual family there, Em,” Peter sighed. “And Helen still isn’t speaking to me, so…”

“That’s her decision to make,” Michelle insisted. “I get that she’s hurting, but she’s the one choosing not to be involved in her granddaughter’s life. That doesn’t mean you deprive the kid of all the love you have to offer.” 

Peter dropped his feet to the floor with a huff as the cat hopped up onto the coffee table. 

“Uh-nah-nah,” Max said succinctly. 

“Max, do _you_ want to celebrate that Peter’s been able to keep you alive for nearly nine whole months?” Michelle held the baby closer and spoke directly to her. 

“Ah-ki-ka,” Max giggled and made grabby hands at the cat. 

Peter couldn’t help but smile at her, at all the ways she’d grown in just the time he’d had her. 

“The baby has spoken,” Michelle said sagely. 

“I hate you,” Peter deadpanned. 

Lucky curled up on the coffee table, nudging Peter’s mug too close to the edge with her butt in the process. 

“Bastard cat,” he mumbled as Max pointed excitedly and laughed. 

“Ee--Ee--Ki-ki,” she giggled, completely enamored with that stupid cat. 

“Yeah, we like the kitty-cat, right Max?” Michelle laughed. “Uncle Peter just hasn’t learned how to appreciate her yet.” 

“Ki--ee,” Max replied. “Ki--ee, ki--ee!” 

“The kitty _doesn’t like_ Uncle Peter,” he implored. “I will appreciate the kitty when she stops having a personal vendetta against me.”

“Kitty!” Max exclaimed and both adults finally registered what was going on. Eyes big and heart stilled, Peter stared at the little girl in Michelle’s arms. 

“Did she just…?”

“Oh my God,” Michelle breathed joyfully. “Yes, Max, that’s a kitty, you’re so smart!”

“Holy-- holy shit,” Peter fumbled in his pockets for his phone. “I have to-- Oh my _God,”_ he finally got his phone out and pointed it at the girls. “Can you say that again, Maxie? Can you say _kitty?”_

“Ab-ah-ba,” Max said. 

“Oh, come on,” Peter begged, unable to stop grinning, unable to hold back the thick tears rolling down his flushed cheeks. “You just-- You can do it, baby. _Kitty._ Just one more time so I can show Auntie May? Please?” 

“Ba-ba-ba!”

“Hey, Max,” Michelle pulled the baby to sit down on the floor next to the coffee table with her. “Whose that?” she pointed at Lucky. “Can you tell me who that is?”

Max looked at her, face still bright and alive and happy if not a little confused as to why these people were suddenly so emotional. Peter found himself getting on his knees to sit closer to them, pushing tears out of his eyes with the heel of his hand. 

“Kitty?” Max asked. 

Peter covered his mouth with a hand in a failed attempt to cover the broken sob escaping from his lungs. 

“That’s right,” Michelle said, looking up to meet Peter’s eye briefly. He knew she understood, the reason why this, why every major checkpoint in the _growing up_ of it all was an overwhelming cocktail of joy and guilt, pain and love. “Good job, baby girl. You did so good.” 

“So good,” Peter said, finally dropping the phone so he could scoot forward on his knees and press slobbery kisses to Max’s round little cheeks. “So, so good, you little genius.” 

“Kitty!” Max cackled, tugging at a fistful of Peter’s hair. 

He couldn’t even pretend to be mad. 

*

During the week leading up to Max’s first birthday, the way he was missing Gwen began to shift. 

He could feel it, was aware of it, if only because he was thinking about her extra, thinking about where they had been a year ago, anxiously awaiting the day they would get to meet a yet-to-be named baby and introduce her to the sun. 

His grief for her was complicated-- missing her for himself and missing her for Max, hurting for MJ and Ned and the way that was different from hurting for Harry. 

His grief was complicated and it was changing. 

It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t violent, it was just big and slow-moving and eternal. 

At the start it was loud, of course. It was violent too, and that made sense. People saw that, they understood it, and it _made sense_ to Peter, but it wasn’t like that anymore. At some point, it had become its own thing that filled up Peter’s body and pushed his consciousness out, forcing him to watch himself fall apart from the outside. 

He was self-destructing, slowly disintegrating to nothing, and all Peter could do was watch as it softly scraped away at the fleshy lining of his chest cavity. Softly. Quietly. Violently, in a whole new way and without remorse or any interest in leaving him with so much as a shred of dignity. 

So he watched, from the outside, from the cheap seats to his own execution and longed for a time it had been loud. 

Because the loud had made sense, and when it had been loud he hadn’t been able to feel the happy right alongside of it. 

*

Max woke up early on the morning of her birthday, as if she knew it was a special day and wanted the attention to start as soon as possible. 

Peter had fed her quietly in bed, basking in the calm for a moment before the chaos of the day began. 

May arrived before everyone else, helping him to clean his apartment while he tried in vain to get Max to wear the stupid, adorable little birthday hat he had bought her. Next was Michelle, who had picked up the cake on the way and brought unsolicited, bootleg Spider-Man decorations to hang from every surface she could get her hands on. 

“If we open that cake box and I see even a _hint_ of red and blue, I’m kicking you out of this party,” Peter told her as she put together an actual full-sized cardboard cutout. He was definitely not bitter about the fact that it was taller than him. 

“Can’t wait,” Michelle smirked at him. 

And then his tiny apartment was filled to the brim with people-- people who loved this baby girl and people who had loved her mother. People who had to hold back tears at the sight of Max’s blonde hair growing in around her ears and making her look more and more like Gwen with each passing day. 

She got more toys and blankets and clothes wrapped up in sparkling bows and shining paper than Peter had space for in their little home. And he, who had never been able to accept a gift without a side helping of guilt, was more grateful than anything else. Because she deserved to be spoiled, and he knew he would never be able to really properly do so. 

Ned played music from his phone and Peter took hundreds of pictures of May dancing with Max on her hip, of Michelle trying to feed the baby a bite of cake and getting icing smeared in her hair and across her nose, of Tony explaining something highly scientific to a one-year-old with all the seriousness in the world. 

At some point, Michelle stole the camera out of his hands, replaced it with the baby, and pushed them both to stand beside the Spider-Man cut-out. The party at large jeered at him as he pulled faces at them. Max got an absolute kick out of it and that picture would unironically become his phone background for many months to come. 

He missed Gwen for every single second of it. Missed her with a pang of hope that she somehow got to tune in for moments like this. Not for the moments when Max screamed and he cried or the moments when he fucked up and walked away and let her bonk her head on the coffee table, but for this, yeah. He hoped she was watching. 

And he hoped she didn’t regret putting her legacy in his hands. 

That night, after everyone had left and Peter was getting ready to put Max to bed, he told her a story. 

“On this day, exactly one year ago, Gwendolyne Maxine Stacy was going about her day, taking the train home from work when all of a sudden…”

*

_Max--_

_You’re stubborn and I hate it, but I think your mom would love it so I can’t find it in me to be all that mad._

*

When Peter’s parents had died, Ben had taught him the traditions of Jewish mourning. They had never been the most strictly observant when it came to religious observances, but in the face of the loss of his brother, it became very important to Ben, and thus important to all of them. 

Peter was too young to understand it fully, but even at seven years old he had been the type of child who thrived when given something to learn, something to occupy his brain. He took everything that Ben had to teach him and he absorbed it, and he focused on it, and looking back, it helped. 

They sat shiva and recognized the thirty days of sheloshim and when that was all over, Ben told Peter about Shnat Ha-Evel-- the first year of mourning for one who has lost a parent. He explained that Peter could and even should return to his regular, everyday life-- go to school and have sleepovers at Ned’s house and continue his journey through all of the Lord of the Rings books. 

Peter should do that, Ben said, but Peter could also simultaneously continue mourning, honoring his parents for another eleven months by taking a step back from holidays and celebrations while he contemplated the people he had lost.

Ben had told Peter that it was up to him if he wanted to participate in that final step, that no one could tell him the right way to mourn, but that if he decided it was something he wanted to do, that he and May would support him. 

And so Peter had. 

He had done it then, and he had done it once more after they had lost Ben, and now, coming up on the one year anniversary of Gwen’s passing, he wondered, not for the first time, whether he should have done so for Max. 

He knew that the baby was too young to understand mourning in any regard let alone that of a culture she wasn’t even technically a member of, but he still wondered if there should have been someone mourning Gwen as the mother that she was, remembering her in that way since the one person who could didn’t yet have any sort of perception of death as a concept. 

There was potential there for a real personal spiral, but it was somewhat saved by the existence of the recognition of the anniversary of a death each year, the Yahrzeit. 

May came over to Peter’s apartment at sundown the night before, along with Michelle and Ned, and they lit the yizkor candle that would remain burning for the next twenty-four hours. 

He held Max in his lap, watched as her eyes lit up in the sparkle of the light, watched as she became enamored with the shine of it in the reflection of the dark window pane. 

It was the way he knew she would have looked at her mother, and as much as it hurt to think about, it also settled something in him, something like certainty. 

Maxine Stacy would never question how much she was loved, by those she had lost or by those she still had. Peter would make sure of it. 

*

Peter was out on patrol when he got the phone call. Max was staying with May and Happy so he could stay out a bit later, make up for disappearing for a few days while the baby had a cold. 

“Doctor Cho is calling,” Karen told him as he came to perch on the roof of the tallest building in the vicinity. “Should I put her through?”

Peter frowned, well accustomed to calls with updates on a regular basis, but never this late at night. 

“Yeah, go ahead,” he said. And then, as the call went through. “Hey, Doc what can I do for ya?” 

“Peter,” her voice was heavy, too heavy for a routine call. “I’m calling to inform you that we’ve had an incident.”

“What happened?” he asked tersely. “Is everyone okay? Is Harry-- did he hurt--”

“Everyone is safe,” Cho assured him smoothly. “But Harry has suffered some self-inflicted injuries.”

Peter would have taken his mask off then if he hadn’t needed it to continue the call. He needed air, he needed to breathe, he needed, he thought, to vomit off the side of this building. 

“Please be more blunt with me,” he pleaded. “Did he…?”

“He made an attempt on his life,” Cho explained. “Doctor Krause and I have been discussing a change in his treatment in answer to this.” 

Peter stumbled from his crouched position to sit flat on his ass, feet hanging out in open air and heart racing, racing, racing away from him, plummeting towards impact. He felt a little bit like there must be a limited number of heartbreaks a person could survive, and that he was getting awfully close to the point of no return. 

“I’m gonna drive up,” he said, hearing his own voice falter from somewhere outside his body. “I can be there in a few hours and we can-- we can talk about it.” 

“Okay,” Cho said with a level of empathy that pushed him even farther outside himself. 

“I thought he was doing better,” he said softly. “I thought…”

“He was,” she said. “But he’s at odds with his own mind right now, Peter. It’s no one’s fault.” 

“Yeah,” he cleared his throat. “Yeah, okay. I’ll see you soon.” 

“Drive safe, Mister Parker.”

*

“Listen I don’t put locks on my windows because I want you to be able to get inside if you’re-- y’know, bleeding out or whatever,” Michelle called from the kitchen as he climbed into her apartment. “But if you could use that super-AI to shoot me a text, give me a heads up, that would be incredible.” 

Peter leaned heavily in the doorway to her kitchen, watching her pour hot water over a tea bag as he pulled his mask off and held it tight in his hand. 

She looked up at him and her face fell. 

“What happened?” she demanded. “You’re not actually bleeding out are you?” 

Peter scratched at the place where the neck of his suit sat just below his jawline, restless and coming apart at the seams. 

“Harry tried to kill himself,” he said-- simple and huge. 

Michelle set her tea aside, face going ashen right there before his eyes. “Fuck,” she breathed. “Is he--”

“He’s fine,” Peter said. “He’s-- I mean he’s alive.” 

She lifted a hand to her mouth, looking for all the world as though she was trying to physically keep any and all of her emotional response inside of her body. 

“I’m driving up to the Compound, um, right now really,” he continued, still holding up the doorframe with his shoulder. “Because they want to make some changes to his treatment and as his power of attorney that’s my decision, because of course it’s my fucking decision, and--”

“I’ll come with you,” Michelle said, already grabbing a travel mug from the drying rack and dumping her still-steaming tea into it. “We’ll make sure he gets the treatment he needs.” 

“I got the impression they want to move him from the Compound.”

“If you drive I can research facilities on the way,” she looked at him questioningly. 

“Yeah, that’s-- perfect,” he nodded. “I’m gonna change,” he finally pushed himself upright. 

“Some of your sweatpants and stuff are in the bottom drawer,” Michelle told him. “I’m making you coffee.” 

“Em…” he breathed, forcing her to look away from her determined coffee making. “Thank you.”

She smiled at him in silent understanding and acknowledgment. 

“We’ll figure this out.”

*

“When did he give you power of attorney?” Michelle asked at some point during the drive. 

“Ages ago. We fought about it,” Peter sighed. “I mean, it was obviously one of his methods of hurting himself-- putting his life in my hands like that. But I couldn’t really say no either, right?”

“No,” Michelle agreed quietly. “We’re his family.” 

*

The Compound was quiet when they arrived, lights dimmed and corridors empty. 

Doctor Cho warned them that he might be too tired to talk, that he might be pissed off to see them at all, but they stepped into his room anyway. 

“I told them I didn’t want to see you,” Harry said, sat up in bed, pale and worn down and hooked up to a heart monitor. “This feels like a violation of my rights as a patient.”

“That’s not how this works,” Peter said. 

“Ooh, big guy’s angry,” Harry pouted mockingly. “You upset I fucked it up?”

“That’s not funny,” Michelle said. 

“No, not really,” Harry responded, somehow glib and bitter in the same breath. 

Peter had to look away for a beat, heart jumping in his throat. Michelle took his hand in hers, holding him steady in his battle against himself. 

Harry noticed it, he sneered. 

“So, is this finally happening then?” he asked them, malice dripping from his tongue. “Didn’t take you that long to move on from Gwendy, huh, Parker?”

Peter’s jaw clenched down on the desire to hit a guy who had been resuscitated from a suicide attempt mere hours earlier. Harry was hurting, he reminded himself, he was hurting and angry and wanted Peter to fight back, had been egging Peter to fight back every time he had come to visit. 

Peter dropped Michelle’s hand and took a step forward. 

“Listen, Osborn, you can feel free to tell me to go to Hell if you want, but I’m kinda already there,” he said frankly, a bit of anti-humor touching his tone. “So can we both just pretend-- for a fucking second-- that looking at each other doesn’t make us nauseous?”

“Not if you’re finally gonna be mad at me to my face, we can’t,” Harry said, nearly smug with the way he was obviously getting the rise out of Peter that he wanted. 

“You need-- specialized psychiatric attention,” Peter forced out, word by word, syllable by syllable. “And we’ve talked to your doctors and we’re going to move you to a hospital that’s better suited to that.”

Harry considered him. “Or you could let them release me,” he said simply. “Let me to my own devices, let me do whatever it is I need to do so I’m not your problem anymore.”

That. That broke Peter. 

“Oh, _fuck you,”_ he spat, eyes burning. 

“Harry,” Michelle spoke up, recognizing the need for a moderator. “You know that’s not going to happen.” 

“I killed her,” he continued to speak directly to a fuming Peter. “I murdered Gwen Stacy, so would you please, for her sake, stop treating me like you don’t hate me?” 

“You want me to hate you?” Peter laughed bitterly. “I do, Harry. I hate you for what you did and I hate you for everything that caused it-- for not coming to us when you got sick, for going radio silent with no warning for weeks on end, for knowing the risks you were taking with that ridiculous fucking drug and doing it anyway, for not even having the capacity to show up when Max was born-- I _hate you_ for that.”

“ _Good_ ,” Harry said with painful satisfaction and tears in his eyes. 

“Yeah,” Peter went on. “But if you think I will for a second give up on you, you’re kidding yourself. If you think I loved Gwen that little-- that I loved _you_ that little--”

He stopped abruptly with a choked-off sound of frustration, arms crossed tight enough to burn and gaze falling to the floor. 

A moment passed them by, stilted silence between three people who had once shared endless laughter over beers and could bring a little extra giddiness to any room they entered. Harry surreptitiously wiped at his cheeks with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and no one commented on the fact that he was crying. 

“Fine,” he conceded, soft around the edges in an utterly broken way. “Just-- give me a few weeks before you ambush me again, would you?”

A bubble of a wet laugh escaped Peter’s mouth. “Yeah.” 

Maybe they had both needed for him to get properly angry if they were going to move forward from it, maybe that performance was a part of what it meant to heal. Peter didn’t think so, couldn’t with the way his stomach was threatening to expel the half a pot of coffee he had ingested on the drive up. 

“Harry,” Michelle said, pulling his tired gaze to her face. “You can stop trying to push us away now. It’s not going to work.”

And with that, the last glimmer of the Goblin left Harry Osborn’s eyes as he broke down on himself with a sob. Peter watched as Michelle calmly crossed the room and put her arms around him, embraced him in an act of forgiveness so visceral that Peter almost wished he had a camera to capture it.

But no, it was a passing moment of about a dozen different types of grief all coming home to roost. It wasn’t meant to be captured, only felt. 

And hell if they didn’t feel it. 

*

_Max, I think growing up in a world like this one has gotta count as a trauma all its own. I’m sorry for that._

_And I’m sorry that a third of the things I say to you are apologies._

*

Maxine Gwendolyne Stacy turned two years old. 

And then she turned three. 

She liked Barbie movies and chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs and the color yellow. She had her mother’s eyes and Peter’s sense of humor. She was growing a personality day after day, holding full conversations about the jellyfish exhibit they had taken her to see at the aquarium and forming opinions on the music he played in the car. 

Peter could barely see the time passing in front of him, too caught up in the _now_ of it, in the _then_ of it. His life revolved around a woman no longer present and even more so around the child she had left behind. He was so unbearably happy and so overwhelmed with grief still some days and the meeting of those two things in the middle ached. 

But his life was that of a guardian, and he didn’t have much time for anything else. 

*

“When’s the last time you went on a date anyways?”

They were in the lab at the Tower, because Peter had needed to pick up a spare set of web shooters he had left there-- also hand-me-down toddler clothes that Morgan had long grown out of.

Peter snorted. “A date?” he asked. “You know I’m responsible for a three year old right?” 

“Yeah, you’ve worn that shirt the last three times I’ve seen you,” Tony deadpanned. “I can tell.” 

“What?” Peter scowled down at his shirt. “I have not.” 

“Friday?”

“Okay-- No, Friday, don’t answer that,” Peter cut in before the AI could drag his hygiene with, well with the truth alone. 

Peter picked up an abandoned project on the workbench and began to fiddle with it. He wasn’t positive what it’s purpose was, but he could tell there was something wrong with the way the battery was connected. 

“What are you doing now?” Tony asked, clearly exasperated with this turn of events. 

“I’m tinkering. If we’re having a conversation about my love life, I’m tinkering,” Peter said without looking up. “Think I’ve forgotten what I’m supposed to do with my hands when I’m not holding a baby.”

“You know you’re just furthering my point, right?” Tony crossed his arms indignantly. 

“Why do you even care so much?” Peter laughed. “You used to hate talking to me about this stuff.”

“Yeah, when you were a child,” Tony replied. “But now you’re a dumbass adult who’s actively choosing to harm his own-- fucking, mental health.”

Peter put down the wire cutter in his hand and looked at Tony with pure disbelief. 

“Tony, I’ve been vaguely celibate for a _little_ while because I’m taking care of a toddler,” Peter insisted. “It’s not the end of the world.” 

“No offense,” Tony tossed him a look right back. “But I have never met anyone who relies on human connection the way you do, Peter Parker. This kind of shit _does_ hurt you and quite frankly I think you know that already.” 

Peter scowled. “You’re implying something.”

“Not implying,” Tony shrugged. “Straight up saying that you’ve been punishing yourself for years and it’s time to stop.” 

Immediately, Peter returned to his tinkering with a clenched jaw and tight shoulders. 

“I’d remind you that this is really none of your concern, but you already know that,” he muttered bitterly. 

“Do we need to call May in for this conversation?”

“What? No, absolutely we do not,” Peter blustered. 

Tony very nearly rolled his eyes. “Not about that,” he said with exasperation. “You know what I mean.” 

“Tony…”

“You’re allowed to try again,” Tony continued, a little more sympathetically this time, a little softer. 

All the air left Peter’s lungs without permission. He turned his head so he didn’t have to look Tony in the eye anymore. 

“May never stopped loving Ben,” Tony went on when it became clear Peter couldn’t speak on the subject. “Of course she didn’t, how could she? But that didn’t mean that when she found someone that made her laugh and brought some well-deserved love into her life that she wasn’t allowed to grab ahold of it with everything she had, right?” 

“This is different,” Peter said, low and harsh. 

“Explain to me how,” Tony responded without backing down. 

“May didn’t go out looking to casually date for the hell of it,” Peter said. “She met Happy and they hit it off and they were basically together before they ever went on a date.”

“Right,” Tony said flatly. “Because you definitely don’t have a person like that in your life who has been waiting very patiently for years to have that conversation with you as soon as you’re comfortable with dating again.” 

The wrench in Peter’s hand clattered against the table as his hand slipped and he muttered a quiet but heartfelt _fuck_ in response. 

“Kid--”

“You don’t get it,” Peter cut him off, both hands now flat against the surface of the workbench and shoulders hunched in on himself. “I know you mean well but this is just one of those things that you’re not gonna get, Tony. I mean-- you don’t have-- all of the details even. You don’t _know.”_

Tony sat down at the stool across from Peter, forearms on the table, and head ducked slightly to look at his face. 

“What don’t I know?” he asked, steady and calm. 

Peter swallowed-- there was something caught in his throat and it tasted a lot like blood and tears and late-night wind. 

“That I loved Gwen,” he barely managed to choke out, refusing to meet Tony’s eye. 

“Peter,” he breathed a quiet laugh. “Everyone knows that.”

“No, I-- I was still in love with her,” Peter insisted, begging him to understand. “I never stopped.”

“Yeah,” Tony nodded, still not dissuaded. 

“We had a conversation that night,” Peter looked up then finally, with bloodshot eyes and a deep line between his brows. “We were-- we talked about getting back together so we could be a-- a-- a family.” 

And that was when Tony’s breath hitched, when Peter knew that maybe he was starting to actually get it. 

“I know that this is an impossible thing,” he said carefully. “That a loss like that is unimaginable, I-- God, if I lost Pep I wouldn’t know what to do with myself… But whatever promises you made that night--”

“It’s not about promises I made,” Peter shook his head. “It’s-- It’s about the fact that if I-- _move on,_ wouldn’t that be disrespectful to both of them? To the one that I gave up on and the one that I’m forcing to be a second choice when she deserves-- she deserves so, so, _so_ much better than that?” 

“Come on, you know it’s not that clear cut. You _know_ that life is more complicated than that.” 

“I really don’t want to have this conversation anymore,” Peter pushed back from the table and began to walk away. 

“Yeah, alright, but one more thing,” Tony stood and waited patiently for Peter to turn back around. 

“What?”

“She lost someone too that night, you know?” he challenged. “I might not ever get it but that woman certainly does.” 

Peter chewed on this, stuffed his hands in his pockets, felt his emotional center reach capacity. 

“Alright,” he murmured and then turned and continued his hasty exit. 

He didn’t want to think about the risk of moving forward, he didn’t want to think about why he was so scared of breaking his streak of singledom, he didn’t want to think about the past and what it meant in regards to his future.

He didn’t want to think about it, but now he kind of had to. 

*

_Max--_

_Before you were born, your mom had this fear that the two of you would be lonely. I told her she was wrong then, but looking at your life now and the amount of love in it, I’m reminded just how wrong she was._

_Your family is complicated, and they’re messy, and they piss me off as often as not, but I swear they’ve got enough love for you to power the whole fuckin city._

*

He got an angry voicemail from Helen Stacy one afternoon the October after Max’s third birthday. 

She was feeling locked out of her granddaughter’s life, she was feeling as though he was hiding something from her, she was feeling as though maybe she should just go ahead and sue him for custody if he didn’t call her back immediately. 

“Gwen trusted you with this,” Ned told him after they had listened to the voicemail three times over and had transitioned into post-game analysis mode. “She went through the process of writing up a will while she was pregnant and if she had wanted Helen to have Max she would’ve said so.”

“I know,” Peter sighed, recalling that time at the start of it all when he made a promise to a woman who couldn’t stop pacing his living room. 

_I’m pregnant,_ she had told him, and Peter hadn’t much experience at seeing fear in Gwendolyne Stacy’s eyes, but he did then. 

She had tried to cover it up with confidence, with lengthy monologues about her right to choose, and then she had, very quietly and very timidly, held Peter’s hand and asked _would you help me if I kept her?_

And in no universe would Peter have said no, in no reality would he have stepped away from that woman and the brand new little piece of her that he had yet to meet. 

_Yes,_ he said to her. _I’ll be there the whole time._

The thing was, she was supposed to be there too. 

“Do you think she’ll actually do it?” Ned asked. “Sue for custody?”

“I don’t,” Peter said sincerely. “I think even she realizes that having waited until the kid is three years old would just make her look bad in the long run.”

“But she is a blood relative,” Ned suggested. “Betty knows this really good family lawyer that I think you should call, just-- I mean, just in case, Peter.”

“I have a lawyer,” Peter furrowed his brow and took a long sip of his coffee while Ned looked at him skeptically. 

“This might not be _your_ lawyer’s gig, dude,” he deadpanned. 

“Maybe not,” Peter shrugged. “But it’d be a hell of a lot cheaper since Matt owes me a favor.”

*

Helen didn’t end up suing for custody, but she did take Peter up on his invitation to go trick-or-treating with them later that month. 

Max dressed up as a polar bear and had her first proper conversation with her grandmother. 

They all pretended not to notice when Helen started to cry. 

*

_Love you no matter what, Max._

*

When he was a young boy, Peter used to ask Ben questions that he already knew the answers to, because he always assumed there was something more to it that he didn’t understand yet. In all his restless curiosity, he was really just asking for any sort of grasp on the world, his life, that no one seemed willing to give. 

_I love you no matter what,_ Ben would say, every night as he tucked Peter into bed, and every night Peter would ask him to explain what it meant. 

_It doesn’t matter what happens, nothing will ever affect how much I love you._

Yes, but Ben, what did that _mean._

Peter knew starkly that he had already happened to May and Ben, was happening to them every day since his parents had died and left him without a place to go. Peter had _happened,_ he was happening, and how could Ben possibly know, possibly predict that all of his happening to that world and place and time would be worthy of his love? 

He asked again. _What does it mean?_

Should it not have been more complicated? Should love really have been so simple as _no matter what?_

_Yes,_ Ben had told him. _For us? Yes._

*

Peter was pretty sure that Michelle was Max’s favorite person. His evidence was as follows. 

One. On the nights that Max spent being babysat by family, she nearly always begged if she could go see Aunt MJ and her kitty, and would pout when she found out she had to instead spend the night with May or the Starks. 

Two. Michelle let Max doodle in her sketchbooks, so that next to some of the most intricate pieces of art Peter had ever seen resided a three-year-old’s crayon drawings of stick people and lopsided flowers and, again, that stupid black cat. (This point also existed on the list of reasons Max was Michelle’s soft spot, but that’s not the current matter at hand.)

Three. They had inside jokes that he wasn’t allowed to join in on. They were definitely all making fun of him and he didn’t even care. 

Four. Max asked him once, as he was tucking her in, whether or not he and Michelle were married. 

“No,” he told her. “We aren’t a couple like that.”

“But you love each other,” she implored. 

“It’s-- There are different types of love,” he floundered. Her curiosity would be the death of him one day. 

“Grown ups make everything so complicated,” Max sighed, big and heavy with exasperation beyond her years. 

Peter laughed. 

“You know what?” he tucked her blanket up higher to her chin. “I think maybe you’re right about that.” 

*

This is how it happened. 

It wasn’t something monumental that led into the moment. There wasn’t some clear cut turning point where everything changed and they realized there was no use waiting any longer. 

It wasn’t like a movie and it wasn’t followed by a declaration of eternal devotion, because the two of them knew better than most that the most significant promise one can make is that they’re here, and they’re now, and they will do what they can to make the here and now last as long as they are able. And that when the here and now comes to an end that they will remember you fondly, they will carry you with them, they will still, even at the end, love you. 

“Hey, she finally fall asleep?” Michelle asked softly as Peter walked back into the living room. 

“Yeah,” he sighed as he fell into the couch, head tilted back and arms over his face. “It was one of those nights where we battle over how many stories is too many stories.” 

“Here,” she picked up the empty glass from the coffee table and filled it from the bottle of wine she had apparently cracked open while he was reading his third story of the evening. The glass was actually plastic and had a picture of Barbie on it, because he had gone straight from the plastic cups that everyone used for beer pong you get for free from that pizza place on campus to sippy cups, skipping the part of adulthood where you bought real wine glasses. “You’ve earned it, Uncle Pete.” 

“Oh, bless you,” he took the offered glass with quiet gratitude. “Cheers, Miss Jones.”

“What are we cheers-ing?” she asked, holding her glass back from where he was trying to clink them together, but he just furrowed his brow at her. 

“What?”

“You can’t just cheers to nothing,” she said as though it was obvious. “So, what are we cheers-ing?”

“Uh…” Peter contemplated it for a moment before giving up. “I don’t know, I just spent an hour trying to get a toddler to sleep, why do I have to choose?”

“Alright, alright. To…” she lifted her glass, a look of sincere consideration on her face. Peter couldn’t help but notice that the brown of her eyes went warm in the dim, yellow light of his apartment. “To this god-awful couch,” she shrugged. 

Peter pulled his glass back this time. “No way.”

_“What?”_

“If you’re gonna make a big deal about the cheers, it has to be sincere,” Peter told her, grin pulling at his lips as she rolled her eyes. “You started this, Jones, don’t make that face.” 

_“Fine,_ you absolute thorn in my side,” she said with put-upon exasperation that only made Peter’s heart warmer. 

He hadn’t even started drinking yet, but looking at her, soft in a pair of his sweats that she must have stolen without asking earlier in the night and sparkling with the humor in the air, he felt a little drunk. 

“Whenever you’re ready,” he smirked at her. 

Michelle pulled her legs up onto the couch and got herself comfortable with her glass of wine resting gently against her chest. She was close, and he could smell the spice of Thai food on her from their little family dinner earlier, could feel the warmth of her skin cutting through the chill in the air, could feel the way she always made him feel more settled in the moment, in his life. 

“To your kid,” she lifted her glass and met his eye, earnest and unshakable. “And to her mother.” 

Peter’s smirk shifted into something softer as he lifted his glass to tap against hers. 

“To the Stacy women,” he reiterated and they both took a sip and a moment to breathe. 

Michelle let out a quiet breath as she rested her shoulder on the back of the couch and tipped her head to lay against the cushion. Peter’s hand crossed the small distance between them and carefully moved a curl out of her face, tucking it behind her ear. He had tripped over his own feet when he had seen her return to her natural curls-- but to be fair, he spent most of his time around her trying not to trip over his own feet. 

Before he could pull away, Michelle gently wrapped her fingers around his wrist, ran her thumb across the knob of bone. Peter let his palm flatten out against her cheek, curling around to behind her ear, amongst the hair curling at the nape of her neck. 

“Thanks for coming over tonight,” he said, quiet in a way that was different from _don’t wake the toddler_ quiet _._

Michelle smiled at him, a quick lift of the lips before she turned her head and pressed a kiss to the palm of his hand, all without losing sight of his face. It was as though she was watching for his reaction, watching to see if she had spooked him yet. 

She hadn’t. 

All she had done, really, was be there. From the start and until the end, there on his couch and in his kitchen and hanging bootleg Spider-Man decorations from his walls at any given opportunity. She was there, as they both grieved, as they both grew into their new lives and responsibilities, as the hurt diminished enough to see past tomorrow. 

She was there, and most of it hadn’t been all that romantic, and it hadn’t looked much like a love story, but Peter had always suspected that the movies had been lying to him anyway and since when did they follow anyone else’s rules? 

She was there, and Peter found that he very much wanted to kiss her. So he did. 

There wasn’t much heat to it, because they were both exhausted and because a toddler was sleeping in the next room, but Michelle leaned into it without hesitation, and she pulled him closer by the hem of his shirt. 

Something about it felt familiar in a way it shouldn’t have, given that the last time they had kissed had been going on nine years prior. It wasn’t like a first kiss though. It wasn’t buzzing with newness, but instead warm, like settling into your own bed for the first time in many weeks away from home, or like a home-cooked meal on your first Thanksgiving after moving away for college. 

They pulled away slowly, slow enough that Peter’s lips drifted to her cheek, the bridge of his nose skirting across hers. 

“I think I’m ready now,” he breathed into her skin. 

Michelle kissed him once more, simple and closed-mouthed and smiling. Then, when she had her fill of him and pulled back to take in the sight of his flushed cheeks and bright eyes...

“Good to know.”

_**thirteen** _

**_years_ **

**_later._ **

On hour two of Max’s journey through Peter’s journals, he called her in sick to school. 

On hour four, he brought her food and she asked him to leave her door open. 

On hour six, she started taking pictures of the pages holding pasted-in photographs with her phone and saving them to their very own album. 

On hour eight, she left her room, hair a tangled nest atop her head and hands tucked under her armpits self consciously and stood in front of where Peter seemed to be working from home at the kitchen table. 

He looked up at her, exhausted and hurt because she had made him exhausted and hurt. 

“Hey, kiddo,” he spoke up first because Max was too much of a coward to do so, too wrapped up in her own shit. “You need something?”

“Is Aunt Michelle here?” she asked. 

“She had to run to the storage unit,” he responded, a little dejected. “She should be home soon though.” 

Max nodded to herself, lifting her head to look around the apartment briefly as she chewed on the inside of her cheek and tried to find the words to describe how she was feeling. It looked different today, this place that she had called home since before she could even form memories. 

Yesterday it was just yellow walls that had been blue six months ago and white eight months before that because Michelle liked to paint; yesterday it was a place to drop her dance bag while she was at school and her school bag while she was at dance. 

Yesterday it was nothing more than the place that she lived, but today she could see the history of it. 

There were notches marked into one of the cabinets that noted Max’s growth spurts over the years and there was a little plastic Spider-Man cake topper that MJ liked to hide in Peter’s things for him to find and there were pictures on the mantel of Gwen Stacy-- who had been a name and a collection of worn out stories for sixteen years but was feeling more and more like a fully realized part of Max’s life with each passing moment. 

The way she was getting to know her mother, it was making her realize just how well she had always known the people who had stepped up for her. 

“I’m sorry for yelling,” Max said, throat thick and head heavy with the weight of pen on paper, of a life given in service not just to his city but to _her._ Always to her. 

“That’s okay,” he said, closing the lid of his laptop and making sure she knew she had all of his attention. How had she ever thought she didn’t? How had she ever even considered that he wasn’t one of the best things to ever happen to her? 

“I-- Um,” she rocked back and forth on her heels a couple of times, really hoping she managed not to start crying again. “I don’t hate you, Uncle Peter. I didn’t mean that.” 

“I know you don’t. You were mad,” he assured her gently. “You’re allowed to be mad.”

She hummed to herself, a sound of acknowledgment but not necessarily agreement. 

“I’ve been reading the journals you gave me,” she told him. “The ones you wrote.”

“Yeah?”

“You write about your-- your Uncle Ben a lot?”

Peter smiled softly at the name. “Yeah. I think about him a lot. Especially when you were little.” 

“You said-- In one of the journals you talked about how you learned how to be a person from him,” she continued unsteadily towards her point. “That he, um, taught you about responsibility and about-- self worth.”

“He did,” Peter cocked his head to the side, fond and quizzical in the way he was looking at her. 

“I think… I think sometimes I get really caught up in, like, not knowing where I come from,” she tried to explain as she tugged at the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “And I just-- forgot? That I do know? Because I come from you, and I come from MJ, and Aunt May and Uncle Happy and the rest of them, right? I mean, I come from my mom too, and reading all of this stuff I-- I have more in common with her than I thought-- but you’re the one that I learned how to be a person from. I’m just-- What I’m trying to say is that-- I think you’re my Uncle Ben, and I’m sorry if I haven’t always appreciated that.” 

And for the second time in twenty-four hours, Max had made him cry. 

Tears slipped down his cheeks and he brushed them away quickly even as he continued to look at her with utter disbelief, a type of awe that she recognized from when he stood outside her dance studio and watched her do the kitri variation for the first time all the way through on pointe. 

Maybe it was pride, but it felt more like love. 

“I’m gonna hug you now,” he said as he pushed himself out of his chair and crossed the kitchen. Max didn’t fight him when he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and kissed the side of her head, instead hugging him back with vigor. 

“I’m really sorry for yelling,” she said into his shirt, and maybe she had started crying too somewhere along the way. 

“I love you so much, kiddo,” he responded, rocking her gently where they stood. “You know that, right?”

She thought about the way he had given up his life for her, the way he had taken her in as his own, the way he had loved her from the start and made sure she knew it. He was a hero to the city, the world, the universe at large-- but he still came home at the end of it all and helped her with her trigonometry homework and made sure she ate three times a day and reminded her to text him when she was on her way home from ballet class each night. 

“I know,” she said. “I love you too.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks as always for stopping by <3


	4. MJ

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _A still life of sorts, featuring their coffee table and the collection of objects strewn out across it. An open first aid kit, a thawing ice pack leaving a puddle of condensation on the wood, a half-empty mug of tea, a bin of crayons and a Barbie with half her hair cut off._
> 
> _It looked like a life, paused. A life, in progress. A life that was theirs._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen, if I had any artistic ability whatsoever there would be art for this chapter but that's okay and hope you enjoy! 
> 
> (posting this and the epilogue at the same time like I did the first two chapters fyi thanks for stopping by <3)

When Aunt MJ arrived home from her nondescript errand, setting down a plastic storage tub by the front door, Max and Peter were eating out of a massive bowl of popcorn and playing a game of poker with potato chips instead of poker chips. 

“Who’s winning?” she asked as she slipped off her shoes and joined them at the kitchen table. 

“I am,” they both said simultaneously before glaring at each other. _“I_ am,” they repeated in unison. 

Michelle laughed and stole one of Peter’s chips, popping it in her mouth. 

“You’re terrible,” he mock- gasped. 

“Positively villainous,” Michelle deadpanned in reply. 

They had always been like this, for as long as Max could remember. The ability to take difficult times and make them easier with a turn of phrase or quirk of the lips; the ability to pull at one another’s strings and guide each other to a place of mutual comfort. 

When she was younger, Max hadn’t realized how unique it was, this relationship and its foundation of hope in the face of tragedy, of plans in the face of devastation. But then she had gone to school, gone to the studio and met more and more adults who got bogged down in the things that her aunt and uncle took in stride, lived through with every passing day. 

They were cracked in places and irreparable in others and still, _still_ hopeful. 

“You working tonight?” Michelle asked as Peter lost the hand and pretended it wasn’t on purpose. 

“I don’t have to,” he met her gaze in a meaningful way, having a full conversation right there in front of Max without ever saying a word. “Did you find what you were looking for?” he nodded towards the tub in the entryway. 

“Yeah,” she nodded. “We’ll be good here.”

Peter looked to Max then, eyebrows lifted in a question. 

“You can go, but I’m gonna start eating my cake while you’re gone,” she said with a little shrug. 

It was the nature of their relationship that they could turn around a tense moment relatively quickly, and that in itself was a testament to who Peter was on a basic human level. Although this particular instance of tension was more intense than the usual, it still wasn’t brand new to them, not to the girl who had been digging for her own identity with her bare hands for as long as she could remember. 

Peter let out a long breath, and then: “Yeah, fair enough.” 

When, five minutes later, he stepped out of his room suited up and holding his mask in his hand, he placed a kiss to the top of Max’s hair, one to Michelle’s lips, and promised not to be out too late. 

“So,” Michelle said once he was out the window, forearms on the table and levelling Max with a nearly serious look. “Cake first or is the curiosity killing you?” 

Max made a face and Michelle chuckled. 

“Yeah, alright,” she conceded. “Go grab it.” 

Without hesitation, Max hurried to the front door and wrapped her arms around the plastic tub. 

“Lift with your legs!” Michelle called out to her. 

“Duh,” Max replied, as she stopped lifting with her back. 

She dropped the bin beside the kitchen table with a _thud_ and then looked at Michelle expectantly. There was a hint of a smile on Michelle’s face as she motioned for Max to open it. 

“Go on then,” she said. 

Max wasn’t sure what she was expecting as she snapped off the lid and leaned forward in her seat to witness what was inside, but it should have been obvious. 

“These are your sketchbooks,” she realized, touch light as she picked the topmost one up, as if it was too delicate, as if it might fall apart at any moment. “That’s why you were at the storage locker.”

“I have more boxes I need to comb through to find some of the earlier stuff,” Michelle said, taking the book from Max’s hands and opening it to the first page. “These are all from around the time Peter and I started dating-- you were four here,” she pointed to a whole page of thumbnail sketches, all of a young, smiley Maxine. 

“I’ve never seen these before,” Max said, unable to take her eyes off of the intricate detail of Michelle’s sketching style-- different than the more recent pieces of art she had seen, but still with a certain something to them that was very MJ. 

“I packed a lot of them away when I moved in with you guys,” Michelle explained. And then, as an afterthought, “I can’t really remember why now.” 

“Was I there?” Max asked, looking back down at the page in front of them. “When you drew these?”

“You were,” Michelle nodded. “Most of the stuff in these will probably be from life.”

Max turned the page carefully to find a rough, full-page sketch of herself, tiny and beaming and wearing a fluffy tutu. She was holding it out between thumb and forefinger with both hands in a graceless curtsey. 

She couldn’t help it, she smiled at the image. “That was my first recital costume.”

“Oh, you were beside yourself with that thing,” Michelle grinned. “Barely took it off for a week after you brought it home and begged me to draw you wearing it.” 

Max’s heart, which had been through the ringer over the previous twenty-four hours, thumped loudly in her chest and she felt her skin get warmer. 

“You remember all that?” she asked quietly, unsurely. 

The look on Michelle’s face in response was subtle in its confusion, but confused nonetheless. 

“Of course I do,” she said. “It’s your life.” 

Was there a word, Max wondered, for the apathy that came along with constant and unyielding love? Was that word privilege or was it selfishness or was it something else entirely that described the way Max had managed to go sixteen years without realizing that she was hardly the little orphan Maxine that had been a continuous part of her personal identity for so long?

She wasn’t stuck in an orphanage somewhere, wasn’t in the perpetually underfunded foster system, and was instead overflowing with family. They had never been well-off of course, but Peter and Michelle had known how to make the money in their bank accounts stretch to bring fun to Max’s childhood, to bring magic and knowledge and all good things. When they had seen her passion for dance begin to build, even then they had done whatever it took to support her, even when it was hard and even when it was near impossible. 

“Do you, um,” Max ran her thumb over the worn corner of the sketchbook. “Could you tell me about them?” 

She asked because although she had memories from that time in her life, she had never really stopped to think about what it had been like for the adults. Raising her, holding her, watching her grow. 

Michelle, who wasn’t the physically affectionate one in the family, reached out and placed a single soft hand over Max’s on the tabletop. 

“Of course.”

_**thirteen** _

**_years_ **

**_earlier._ **

She was dating Peter Parker. Again. 

She was dating Peter Parker again and they weren’t telling anyone about it yet, just in case it all blew up in their faces, but dating still they were. 

It wasn’t all that different from what their lives had looked like leading up to _dating again,_ what with the toddler and their jobs and the many other innumerable responsibilities constantly piling up on their plates. 

But there was a lot more making out on the couch after the kid was asleep, like a couple of teenagers trying not to get caught by their parents but in reverse. 

“I swear I’m gonna take you on a real date soon,” Peter said on one of such nights, about three weeks into their _dating again_ status. “I just gotta find a babysitter who isn’t you.”

“May?” Michelle suggested, straddling his lap but sitting back so her butt was on his knees and she could see his entire face. 

“Always has a lot of questions when I need a babysitter,” he sighed, running his thumbs over her hip bones. “And she can always tell when I’m lying. It’s spooky.” 

Michelle made a face and tilted her head as if to say _fair enough._

“I don’t suppose Morgan’s old enough to babysit yet?” she chuckled. 

“Thirteen? Not quite,” Peter made a face. “But if you think I haven’t been counting down the days.” 

“I think anyone you ask is going to read into the fact that neither of us can watch her on the same night,” Michelle conceded. “We’ve dug ourselves into a hole by being self-sufficient.” 

Peter laughed, burying his face in her neck to keep himself quiet and wrapping his arms completely around her waist. 

“What’s so funny?” she asked, holding him close and unable to keep the beginnings of a smile off her own face. 

“It’s just-- only we could make our lives more difficult by being on top of shit for once,” he said, leaning back to look at her, grinning as his eyes skated over the planes of her face. 

Michelle smiled back, aware of the way his eyes lingered on her lips. She leaned closer. 

“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “We always do.”

And then she kissed him, and she chose not to catalogue all of the different reasons her heart fluttered. 

*

They went out for dinner in Brooklyn on the following Friday night, and it was almost immediately awkward. 

Max was with Ned, because they figured that way at least the news would spread quickly enough that they wouldn’t have to actually inform anyone that they were seeing each other, and they had thus somehow managed to get the whole night to themselves. 

Michelle had agonized over her appearance in ways she hadn’t for years, and she could tell that Peter had too with the way he’d taken time to tame his hair and put on a belt. They sat at a dim booth at the back of a little Italian place and read the menu in stilted bouts of small talk in between stretches of silence. 

It was weird. 

“This is weird, isn’t it?” she gave the feeling of it life. 

Peter grimaced at her in an apologetic sort of way, a self deprecating one. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a little?”

Michelle nodded shallowly, gaze dropping to the tablecloth and pulse picking up with the weight of all her worst case scenarios. She knew it was a longshot that he would ever want her again, she had known for years and still she had gone on loving him, and hating herself for loving him, and apologizing in the hours after the sun had set to the woman whose trust she kept, kept, kept betraying. 

“I’m not trying to replace her,” she blurted out across the table, because she needed to make sure he knew, because the guilt was eating her alive. “I would never-- I’m not trying to steal her life.”

Peter was baffled, that much she could see when she looked up at him. 

“I know,” he assured her as if it should have been obvious. It wasn’t, nothing was. 

“I wasn’t waiting around for the two of you to…” she shook her head. “Even before she died, I wasn’t. I was perfectly happy-- so happy, to be your friend. That was always enough for me.” 

Maybe they shouldn’t have been having that conversation in public, not by the way they were both emotionally unhinged when it came to conversations about Gwen Stacy, even after years of learning to live without her. They kept talking anyway. 

“We’re being really honest right now, right?” Peter asked, looking perfectly anxious in his own regard. Michelle nodded. “Okay, because. I think we both know that there’s a universe where Gwen survived and we never even considered getting together again. She survived and I would have-- I mean, I might very well have married her if she let me.”

“I know,” Michelle said, not hurt by this knowledge, having been just as aware of it as he was. 

“But this isn’t that universe,” he continued gently. “And-- Look, I’ve thought about this a lot and I’m pretty sure we’re both very different people now than we were before we lost her. And I think that who I am now and who _you_ are now? I think those people are able to love each other in a much realer way than the ones who came before.” 

“We’re not replacing anyone,” Michelle tried to continue his thought unsteadily. “We’re just, living. As we are now.” 

“Yeah,” Peter agreed in a breath. “As we are now.” 

Michelle drank her water as she absorbed this point of view, tried to give it more space inside her chest and shrink down the capacity for guilt by a few notches. 

“You realize you just told me you loved me on our first date, right?” she pointed out, trying to lighten the air around them with a faint smirk. 

It worked, she knew by the way Peter laughed with his whole face. 

“Look at my life,” he said. “You really think I’d take the time to go on a date if I didn’t?” 

*

_A sketch in pencil at the top right corner of a page of a boy, a man with unrestrained hectic energy in his eyes and a princess wand in his hand and a tiara on his head and a sheepish look on his face-- dated in a hasty scrawl._

*

“I think maybe I’m failing Max on the socialization front,” Peter told her one day while they were grocery shopping together. 

Michelle had explained to him that if he wanted her to spend the night as often as he did, Peter was going to need to stock more adult foods in his pantry than instant coffee and the baggie of weed that Ned had given him on his birthday but he refused to smoke because he was _a legal guardian now, Leeds._

So they were grocery shopping. 

“What do you mean by the _socialization front?”_ Michelle asked, grabbing a box of her favorite tea bags and dropping them in the cart.

“Like, making sure she has friends her own age and shit.”

“I mean, she’s still only four,” Michelle said. “That stuff will come when she starts school for real, right?”

“I don’t know,” Peter sighed, leaning heavily against the cart so he was nearly doubled over as he pushed it lethargically behind her. “I’ve been reading a lot of parenting books--”

“When the fuck do you have time to read parenting books?” Michelle snorted. 

“Okay, Karen reads me parenting books while I’m on patrol,” he conceded and she couldn’t help but walk backwards so she could grin at him, could see all the paternal concern and love adorning his face. He was beautiful regardless, she had accepted that a long time ago, but something about this version of him was beautiful in its own right. Mussed up and exhausted and anxious, but still beautiful. “But the point still stands.”

“Well, what do the books say?” she asked, dragging the cart by its front to take them down the cereal aisle. 

“Group activities are good for kids her age,” he said. “Does she seem like the kind of kid that would like tee-ball?” 

Michelle made a face. “My gut says no.”

Peter let his head fall onto his forearms. “Yeah,” he agreed dejectedly. 

“Hey, come on, this is solvable,” she tugged the cart on its wheels to get him to look up at her. “Let’s just think about it for a minute, yeah?”

“She’s not sporty, MJ,” he said. “She’s been raised by a whole village of geeks. I can’t in good conscience throw her to the wolves like that.” 

Michelle chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you were never gonna raise an Olympian, huh?”

“They don’t have, like, chess club for toddlers do they?”

“You think Max is going to be a chess club kid?” Michelle shot him a look. 

“If you haven’t caught on to the fact that I’m floundering yet, I dunno what to tell you,” he responded flatly. 

“You’re not floundering-- Grab that shredded wheat.”

Peter grabbed the shredded wheat. 

“I suggested chess-- ergo floundering,” he said. “Ergo in need of better suggestions from your far better brain.” 

“Oh, that flattery,” Michelle deadpanned. “Just take me right here, Parker.”

Peter exhaled something between a cackle and an exasperated groan. 

“ _MJ.”_

“What about ballet?” she suggested, now that she had stalled long enough to come up with a viable solution. 

“Ballet?” Peter considered it. 

“She watches those Barbie Swan Lake and Nutcracker movies in rotation like they’re the only films ever made,” she shrugged. “And it would give her a place to put all that energy.”

Peter stalled. 

“That’s… sort of genius,” he gaped at her. “How did I not think of that?”

Michelle smirked at him. 

“I have a far better brain.”

*

_Betty Brant in graphite, glass of wine in hand and smirking. She knows something you don’t._

*

“You’re white picket fencing it.”

“Why’s it gotta be white?” Michelle smirked, but Betty just kicked at her knee with a socked foot. 

Betty’s apartment was even smaller than Michelle’s, on an entry level reporter’s salary and all the money she sent home to help with paying for her little brother’s school books, but no one knew how to make a space cozy like Betty Brant. 

Curled up on her couch together and sharing a t-shirt quilt that Betty had made from every extracurricular t-shirt she’d acquired at Midtown, they were buzzing with wine in their stomachs and loose at the lips. 

“MJ you are _first comes love, then comes marriage--”_

“First came girlhood crush, then came love, then came a ten-year breakup,” Michelle laughed. “ _Then_ came a baby that was actually someone else’s baby--”

“And then came love again!” Betty exclaimed. “Although I’m still not convinced you haven’t loved that idiot the whole goddamn time.” 

“Oh come on, I was not hung up on him,” Michelle groused. “I dated plenty of other people.”

“I mean…” Betty made a face. 

“I dated Harry!”

“For like two months-- doesn’t count.”

“I dated plenty of people in California,” Michelle insisted. 

Betty made another, more displeased face. “California people _definitely_ don’t count.” 

Michelle sighed and leaned further into the soft cushions of the couch. 

“You’re not gonna let me have this, are you?” she asked. 

“Absolutely not,” Betty said brightly. 

“Alright then,” Michelle gesticulated broadly. “Say what you want to say-- do your worst.” 

Betty’s face softened, head tilted to the side with a growing smile filling her round face all the way to the edges. Michelle lifted a brow at her. 

“What?”

“Nothing, it’s just--” Betty shook her head. “It’s been a really long time since I’ve seen you this happy, MJ.” 

The warmth in Michelle’s belly went sour with the stark reminder that always lived just to the left of her consciousness-- that all of her happiness was required to come with a heaping side serving of guilt. 

It must have shown on her face, the way she was sitting, something, because Betty doubled down. 

“Don’t do that,” she demanded. 

“Do what?” Michelle tried to brush her off. 

“I can smell the-- self flagellation from here,” Betty responded with a broad gesture of her hand in Michelle’s direction. 

“Oh, come on.”

“No listen to me,” Betty scooted closer to her on the couch. “Not that it’s a requirement, and not that it’s necessary, but you’ve fucking earned this thing you’ve got, MJ. You deserve to relish in it a little bit.” 

“I’m not gonna relish in the fact that Gwen is dead and that her kid is growing up without a mother.”

“Fuck you, you know that’s not what I meant,” Betty said without any actual heat to it, more like sympathy if Michelle was being completely honest with herself. 

“I know,” Michelle relented. “Sorry.” 

“That’s okay,” Betty said sincerely. “Just-- I dunno, consider giving happiness a shot?”

Michelle met her gaze, met Betty’s pleading with some combination of exasperation and gratitude. 

“I’ll consider it.”

*

Michelle took Max with her to work one Friday afternoon, when Peter got pulled into some Spidey-related scuffle and couldn’t pick her up from daycare. 

She worried that the little girl would be miserable, stuck in a stuffy museum and forced to be quiet for hours on end, but Michelle realized very quickly that they very well might have had something of a young art enthusiast on their hands. 

Michelle gave her a tour of some of her favorite exhibits, and felt her heart soar when Max let out little breaths of exclamation. _Wow_ and _Aunt MJ look at this one_ and _that’s so cool_ would follow Michelle for days, weeks, years. 

“Can we come back again?” she asked Peter when he came to pick her up, and maybe he could feel it, the way she wasn’t just growing up, but she was taking after them as she did so, because he looked at Michelle with all the strength of the sun. 

“You got it, you little nerd,” he said brightly as he picked her up and placed her on his shoulders. “Say thank you to Aunt MJ.”

“Thank you, Aunt MJ,” Max beamed. Michelle’s stomach twisted with something she wasn’t sure she understood. Maybe because it was more than just one thing, churning in her gut that day. 

“Anytime, kiddo.”

“Thank you,” Peter leaned forward and kissed her, right at the corner of her mouth. “Seriously.” 

Her heart took a catch step inside her ribs. 

“Anytime,” she said. 

It was a little scary, how much she meant it. 

*

_Max, sitting on a bench in the middle of a showroom, back turned to us but head tilted in enraptured focus as she gazed up at the massive painting of a woman dancing that dwarfed her._

*

Michelle and Peter had been together for just over a year when he suggested one night, off-handed but clearly thoughtful, that she move in with him and Max. 

He laid out all of the pros for her-- the fact that she spent the night at their place more often than not anyway, the fact that it was actually a few minutes closer to her job, the fact that they’d be able to see each other more between their insane schedules, the fact that they could share the rent and maybe start saving money instead of hemorrhaging it each month. 

She loved him and this way that he was speaking her language, using logic and facts to make her more comfortable, but even still it scared her. 

“I’m not trying to pressure you,” Peter said. “But can you explain to me what’s scaring you? So we can figure out how to fix it?” 

And maybe that was it, the moment Michelle realized that in order to be close to people you had to first let them worry. Michelle had always tried to show her love by closing off all of the difficult pieces of herself, all the parts that would be cause for concern to someone who cared. 

She thought that it was a signifier of how much she cherished a person, keeping extra bullshit off of their plate and handling it on her own, making sure they never had to take on anything that wasn’t explicitly their problem to handle. 

But she knew now, with all her years of experience, with this love that she had built from scratch once, twice, three times, that a relationship couldn’t function like that. When you lived a life like hers, like Peter’s, like everyone in their little universe’s, the worry came hand in hand with the love. 

When a person chose to love you, they were choosing to take on that worry, and Michelle was finally learning how to be okay with that. 

“I don’t want to end up abandoning her,” she told him, finally honest out loud. 

Peter tilted his head to the side, confused. “What makes you think that would happen?”

“Peter,” she sighed. “I love you. And I know that in some way I’ll always love you, no matter what, but I can’t ignore the trajectory of everything that’s happened to us so far or believe unequivocally that this doesn’t have the potential to get fucked up somewhere along the line.” 

Realization, on his face and in the way he held himself all at once. 

“I’d never cut you out of her life,” he said, soft and sure. “No matter what happens with us, I’d never do that.” 

“That’s easy to say now because you like me,” Michelle responded with a melancholy smile. 

Peter very nearly rolled his eyes. He didn’t, but the tone was there when he said, “I more than _like_ you, Michelle.” 

“That’s my _point_ \-- what are you doing?” she watched as he climbed over her to grab her sketchbook and pencil off the bedside table. 

“Borrowing this,” he said as he opened it to the first blank page. 

“Okay…” she said skeptically as he began to write. 

“I know that-- I mean, I’m holding back on suggesting a shared custody situation because I know you and I know it’s too early to suggest that to you--” he explained as Michelle became continuously more awestruck. “But that doesn’t mean that we can’t put it in writing.”

He signed his name at the bottom of the page and then drew an X and a line beside it and handed the whole sketchbook to Michelle. She accepted it and began to read. 

_We the undersigned (Peter B. Parker and Michelle W. Jones) hereby agree that our mutual status as Uncle and Aunt to one Maxine Gwendolyne Stacy is not contingent on the status of our relationship-- romantic, platonic, or otherwise._

She was speechless at the sight of such a gesture, a gesture that she wasn’t entirely sure she had earned or deserved in any tangible way but made her throat feel tight and her lungs tremble. 

Michelle gently extricated the pencil from Peter’s hand, let it hover over the page for a beat, and then signed. 

When she looked up at Peter, he had a hopeful grin on his face, uncertain and tremulous but hopeful all the same. She pulled him towards her by the nape of his neck and kissed him once on the lips. 

“You’re gonna need to clear a shelf for me in the shower,” she said as she closed the sketchbook and set it aside. 

“Hmm, might be a dealbreaker,” he said, grinning all the while and tugging at the hem of her shirt to pull her closer once more. 

“Tough shit.”

She kissed him in the home they were building for themselves. 

*

_A handwritten contract, and a stick figure family in the corner._

*

Michelle was in line at the coffeeshop a block away from the museum when her phone rang. Usually, she tried to avoid spending her money on overpriced coffee in Brooklyn, but it had been a long day with an early start and something was telling her that she was going to need the caffeine boost to get her through the rest of the afternoon. 

Turned out she was right. 

“Jones,” she answered. 

“Hey, Em! How’s it going, how’s your day-- been?”

Michelle frowned because his words were casual but his tone was far from it-- frantic and out of breath and-- what was all that clanging?

“Why does it sound like you’re sprinting?” she asked flatly. 

“Uh…”

“Is it because you’re sprinting, Parker?” 

“I-- Well-- Fuck, fucking rooftop gardens,” he blustered and Michelle winced at the sound of a bodily impact. 

“Dude, if you’re being actively mauled right now, I feel like we shouldn’t be talking,” she tried to remain calm despite how even years of this being her norm didn’t make listening to him in pain any easier. 

“Right, I know,” Peter gasped. “I’m just-- kinda caught up in this pursuit?”

“No shit.”

“And Max gets out of ballet in like twenty minutes and there’s no way-- Oh, fuck you dude! Not fair!-- No _way_ I’m gonna make it on time.”

Michelle ran a hand over her face as she took another step forward in line. 

“I can pick her up if you promise not to be bleeding, like, an unreasonable amount when you get home,” she sighed. 

It wasn’t the retrieving of Max that had her immediately on edge, it was the fact that her boyfriend was a good-hearted idiot with a tendency for trouble. 

“Thank you-- Em, _thank you,”_ he implored. She didn’t miss the fact that he made no promises regarding the whole bleeding request. 

“Yeah, of course,” she replied. “Be careful out there, please. Love you.”

“Love you too! Don’t come into Midtown!”

A click and he was gone and Michelle was muttering a grumbling, anxious _dumbass_ to herself as she stepped up to the register. 

“I’m gonna need the biggest black coffee you can get me and a hot chocolate.” 

*

Twenty-five minutes later, Michelle was stepping into the studio lobby just as a flood of young girls ran out of the studio and started changing their shoes and pulling street clothes out of their little cubbies. 

It was a chaos of parents and kids and the class of teenagers playing music from their phone speakers and laughing at the other end of the hallway while they stretched. Because of the way their schedules usually played out, Michelle didn’t usually pick Max up from class, and stood awkwardly at the outskirts of the mob of people, coffee and hot chocolate clutched close to her chest as she scanned for a little blonde head with the Spider-Man scrunchie she was insistent on wearing. 

“MJ!”

Max appeared from the center of the crowd, beaming as she pushed unapologetically through her fellow classmates, little dance bag clutched in her hands and pink wrap skirt tangled up in the waistband of her sweatpants. 

“Hey, you,” Michelle crouched down and straightened out her skirt, zipped up her jacket the rest of the way. “How was class?” 

“We danced with fans today,” Max said. “Like in Don Key-hote!”

“Don Quixote?” Michelle smiled at her. “That’s so cool. I bet you looked like a badass.”

One of the mothers nearby shot Michelle a look for her language, but Max giggled and it made it all worth it. 

“Here, gotcha something,” Michelle handed over the child-sized hot chocolate that was definitely cool enough for drinking by that point. “Cocoa.” 

Max took the cup in both hands and took a big, overexaggerated sniff of it, eyes closed and relishing in the sugary sweetness. 

“You like that?” Michelle laughed. 

“Mmhmm,” Max nodded enthusiastically. 

“What do you say?”

“Thank you very much, Aunt MJ,” she replied obediently before taking a sip and immediately coming away with a little whipped cream mustache. 

“You’re very welcome,” Michelle used the sleeve of her coat to wipe Max’s mouth and was about to take her hand and lead her outside when she was tapped on the shoulder. 

“I’m sorry-- Are you on the list of people allowed to pick up Maxine?” It was the mother from before-- the one that was displeased with Michelle’s vocabulary. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”

“I am,” Michelle stood up to her full height. She had coffee in her system and her boyfriend was probably in mortal peril on the other side of the city so she wasn’t in the mood to placate a nosey mom. “I’ve picked her up a few times.” 

“I’d like to double check that with Miss Nadia before you take her,” the woman smiled at her in a way that didn’t portray any real happiness. “It’s only, usually her dad picks her up.”

“Her uncle?” Michelle made a face. 

“I don’t have a dad,” Max said, simple and to the point and without any real strife to her tone as she contentedly sipped at her hot chocolate with one hand and reached out to grab Michelle’s with the other. 

It was an ongoing conversation, the one where she and Peter tried to help her understand the ways her family was lacking but the way she was still so wanted, so very loved. She wasn’t old enough to really get it yet, they thought, the reality of death, but this much she knew. 

The mother’s eyes got big and she visibly floundered, clearly searching for an apology or a question or something else that Michelle didn’t have the energy for, so she waved across the room at Max’s teacher to get her attention. 

“Nadia! I’m taking Max.”

“Got it! Thanks Michelle,” Miss Nadia smiled at her. “She did great today.”

And with that, Michelle and Max left hand in hand, leaving a sputtering dance mom in their wake. 

*

Michelle texted Tony on the train ride home, trying to get any information she could on the state of whatever was going on in Midtown. 

_He’s got it handled,_ Tony replied. _I promise I’m keeping an eye on it._

_And if he doesn’t really have it handled?_ Michelle responded within seconds. _Someone’s on standby?_

She tapped her fingers restlessly against the rail and looked down at Max swinging her sneakered little feet in the chair they’d managed to grab her. She supposed maybe the feeling of waiting for Peter to come home actually wasn’t all that familiar anymore-- because she couldn’t freak out about it the way she once might have. 

Michelle had a little girl to take care of, to keep safe and happy and unfrightened despite the fact that she personally didn’t feel any of those things. 

Her phone buzzed and she hastily opened the new message. 

_He’ll be home in time for dinner. Just take a breather, Jones._

Michelle held Max’s hand harder than necessary on their walk from the station to their apartment. 

*

Peter wasn’t home by dinner, and in fact wasn’t home by bath time or bed time either. 

Michelle told Max that he had gotten dragged into some extra work, but that he loved her and would give her an extra big hug in the morning. And then she sat anxiously on the couch and watched the news on mute until he climbed in through the window at one in the morning with a couple of broken ribs and more bruised than not. 

“Fuck you-- _Fuck_ you, Parker,” she said shakily as she held his face gently in trembling hands and kissed him softly. 

“I’m sorry,” he breathed, pulling her to the couch with him, where he stumbled to sit down with a heavy breath and a groan. 

“No one knew what was going on-- I couldn’t…” she shook her head and cut herself off, deciding to put off the tirade for a little while longer. “Are you bleeding? Do you need stitches anywhere?”

“No,” he said. “Just a couple ice packs if we’ve got ‘em. It was more of a blunt force kind of night.” 

Michelle was up and digging through the freezer before he even finished his sentence. She grabbed a whole armful of ice packs and sat back down on the couch with him as he released his suit and gingerly shrugged out of the sleeves to reveal a battered torso. 

“Are you sure you don’t need a doctor?” Michelle asked, carefully placing an ice pack against his ribs and wincing in sympathy at the face he made. 

“Yeah, just need to sleep it off,” he promised her. 

Michelle nodded as she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He was there, he was in front of her, he was alive, and she hadn’t lied to Max. That was what mattered. 

Peter placed his hand over hers where she was gripping the ice pack. 

“I’m really sorry,” he met her eyes with his soft, brown gaze. 

“Usually I can just-- follow along on the news,” she pushed sweat-matted hair away from his forehead. “But you went underground and no one knew where you were. Tony wouldn’t tell me a fucking thing because apparently he doesn’t trust me to not have a meltdown and I just-- I was-- worried.” 

Peter turned his head and kissed her wrist, long and real with chapped, dry lips. 

“I can’t promise it won’t happen again,” he breathed. “I want to, but I can’t.” 

“I’m not asking you to,” Michelle said with a subtle shake of her head. “But I do-- If we talk to her and she’s okay with it, I want co-guardianship of Max. I want-- I want to know that I can be there for her, if anything was to ever happen…”

Her voice cracked as she forced the words out of her mouth, the words that demarcated a series of events that she wasn’t entirely sure she’d survive but knew she had to prepare for. 

“Okay,” Peter kissed her cheek, murmuring continuously into her skin. “Okay, of course. Of course, Em, of course.” 

She kissed him on the lips in lew of response, warmed his skin with the palms of her hands, and then got up to get the first aid kit. 

*

_A still life of sorts, featuring their coffee table and the collection of objects strewn out across it. An open first aid kit, a thawing ice pack leaving a puddle of condensation on the wood, a half-empty mug of tea, a bin of crayons and a Barbie with half her hair cut off._

_It looked like a life, paused. A life, in progress. A life that was theirs._

*

Lunch with Harry Osborn at a cafe near where she worked wasn’t something she had expected to ever experience again. 

But there she was, and there _he_ was, and as casual as they pretended it was there was still the overwrought _knowing_ of each other smack dab in the middle of the table. So they aimed for small talk, they aimed for friendship, they aimed for regular, normal, easy-- and they nearly made it. 

“Okay,” he dropped the act. “Are you gonna tell me how he’s doing or do I have to drag it out of you?” 

Michelle sighed. She dropped the act too.

“You have _got_ to apologize to him, Har,” she responded with a familiar tiredness. “If not for your sake then for mine because I can’t be a go between anymore.” 

“MJ, you can’t really think he’s not being overdramatic,” Harry rolled his eyes and that set her off. 

“You moved out of the hospital and didn’t _tell anyone!”_ she exclaimed. “It’s not at all unreasonable that he’s pissed at you. Quite frankly, so am I-- I’m just not so much about the silent treatment these days.” 

“Everyone agreed that I was ready-- _You guys_ agreed that I was ready!” Harry pushed back. 

“Yes, we did,” she said. “But it might’ve been fucking nice to know you were going through with it so that Peter didn’t have to call one day only to hear _sorry, he’s not here anymore!”_

He took a visible step back when she said that, and good, Michelle thought, that he could take the moment to think about the consequences to his actions. 

“You could’ve been anywhere,” she continued, quieter now, but no less serious. “I know you’re itching for independence again, but you don’t get it by being reckless, you know?” 

Harry hesitated, he chewed on his lip. 

“I got a place,” he said. “I got a place, and I was in the middle of furnishing it, and I was gonna invite the two of you over. Make you dinner and shit to-- to surprise you.”

“What?” Michelle questioned, soft and lacking judgement. Her ribs expanded, expanded, never stopped expanding with the breath of his vulnerability. 

“I was gonna thank you,” he explained. “You know, for not giving up on me? And part of that was going to be proving to you that I had a place-- a furnished place where I could cook you dinner, cook myself dinner, and just-- live.”

Michelle could feel herself studying him, observing the way he was grappling for a sense of self pride and validation in what he had accomplished in his recovery. 

“You were going to make us dinner,” she breathed. 

“Yeah.”

“Talk to him, Harry. Just-- talk to him.”

“Yeah.”

*

Harry hadn’t seen Max since she was a newborn, since she was wrinkly skin and bright new eyes. Since she still had a mother. 

It was decided that he wasn’t going to see her, not yet anyway, not when she was too young to make a choice like that for herself with the full knowledge of who he was and what he had done. Peter and Michelle had made their decisions for themselves, knew when they could handle his presence in their lives and when they needed to take a step back, and if they owed anything to Max it was the right to that same option. 

Even still, they carried with them an unbearable ache in their chests, heavy with the knowledge they would one day have to explain to her who he was, and why they had ever bothered forgiving him. 

_Because it’s what Gwen would have done,_ played on repeat through Michelle’s brain. She didn’t fully trust him, and probably never would, but Gwen had loved him, and Peter had loved him, and she too had loved him. 

And that wasn’t something you just gave up on, so she and Peter had dinner with him at his new apartment. 

By the end of the night each of them had to walk away from the table to push back tears on separate occasions, but by the end of the night they had made it to the end of the night.

*

Some afternoons, when Michelle got home and could hear Peter and Max talking quietly in her room, she listened.

And some afternoons she heard the telltale signs of homework help or Barbie storytime, but some afternoons she heard stories of Gwen Stacy filtering through the walls. 

It didn’t hurt her the way it once did, and Michelle was known to remind Max of the woman who her mother once was frequently as well, but the longer she was with Peter, the longer she lived in that house, the heavier her guilt got in her gut. 

She was a thief. She was the other woman. She was tucking in someone else’s daughter every night, and holding that little girl’s hand on the train ride home from ballet lessons, and hugging her tight when she had a nightmare. 

And she was enjoying it. 

*

A month after Max turned six years old, Michelle went to visit Gwen. 

She didn’t go all that frequently, didn’t find it as beneficial to her grief as Peter did and found that it was probably better for him to go on his own anyway. But she was feeling particularly in need of a conversation with her friend, overflowing with things she needed to say and no one left to hear them, so she went to the cemetery. 

And she stood awkwardly in front of the headstone. 

And she took a deep breath. 

“I-- don’t really know how to do this,” she said, fiddling with her fingers in front of her body. “Um…”

Michelle chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment while she looked across the other headstones surrounding her, and then she crossed her ankles and sat down in the grass so she could properly be at eye-level with the name that would forever reside across the breadth of her shoulders. 

“You haunt me,” she said quietly, hands in the grass now, unable to keep still. “In good ways and in bad, but, you haunt me, Gwen… And I--” she cut herself off with a choked breath, caught off guard because she hadn’t expected this to make her cry at all let alone so quickly. But that was Gwen for you, always able to pull the core of the thing to the forefront. 

“I’m sorry, but I’m so happy,” she said as tears rolled down her chin. “And it’s not fair to you-- the way that I’ve gotten here. I didn’t mean to take your life from you, your-- family. I just went and stole your picket fence and called it my own and never even bothered to ask permission.” 

Her words devolved into a bitter laugh as she wiped her face free of tears. 

“I know you can’t respond, but I need-- I guess what I really need is to know you don’t resent me, but bar that fucking impossibility…” she shook her head. “Bar that, I needed to tell you I’m sorry. Because as selfish as it is, I’m all in with them. And I’m going to stick around for as long as they’ll have me, and I’m going to take care of them, and I’m going to let myself believe all the while that in some twisted way-- if I can make them happy then I’ll be making you happy too.” 

Michelle stayed at the cemetery for well over an hour, even after she got her tears under control, even as something settled in her chest with the knowledge that part of her would always feel the weight of Gwen’s memory but that that didn’t have to be a bad thing. 

She sketched Gwen’s grave, small in the middle of the page and surrounded by wildflowers and tall grass. It was the first time that Michelle had ever felt the need to apologize for being in love. 

But she had to let herself be happy. 

*

When Morgan Stark was sixteen years old, she started showing up to the Parker-Jones-Stacy residence unannounced on the regular. She loved Max and Max loved her and the two of them got along swimmingly despite the ten year age difference. 

Michelle suspected that Morgan’s visits had as much to do with the fact that she was a teenage girl living in a too-tall tower, desperate for an independence that was simply unreachable to the daughter of Tony Stark and Pepper Potts as it did with her love for a six year old, but she wasn’t going to mention it. 

Usually, Morgan was more than welcome to come into their apartment and keep the kid occupied so either Peter or Michelle or both could take a short breather. Mostly, they made her stay for dinner to thank her. 

But today they had plans. 

“Morgan, uh-- What’s up, kiddo?” Peter blustered at the front door, tie hanging loose around his neck. “Hey, Em-- Morgan’s here!”

“Morgan’s here?” Michelle looked up from the couch where she was helping Max into her shoes. 

“Hey,” Morgan waved sheepishly. 

“Morgan’s here!” Peter grinned at her, panic evident in every angle of his posture as he closed the door behind their guest. 

Morgan looked between the two of them with an amused sort of confusion. 

“Everything good here?” she asked suspiciously. 

“Great-- So good,” Peter said. “But we were kinda just about to head out--”

“We’re getting married!” Max exclaimed jubilantly, hopping off the couch with her little buckled Mary Janes and throwing her entire body at Morgan in a hug. 

_“What?!”_ Morgan held Max to her but her focus was flitting between the two adults in the room-- white sundress and suit, neatly done hair, Peter’s camera on the table by the entryway. “Are you seriously--”

“Goddammit,” Michelle pinched the bridge of her nose but couldn’t help the laugh that escaped her. 

Because of course they wouldn’t be able to pull this off, of course they wouldn’t be able to achieve any real stealth, of course Morgan Stark would show up just as they were about to step out the door. 

“Oh, I have got to tell--”

“No, no, no!” Peter snatched her cell phone out of her hand the moment she lifted it to begin calling or texting or whatever her plan was. “Mo, you can’t do that.”

She gaped at them. 

“You can’t be serious,” she said, far too delighted by the situation as a whole. “You didn’t really think you could get _married_ without telling anyone?” 

“We have our reasons,” Peter said. 

“Can I hear them?” Morgan crossed her arms and cocked her head to the side with an air of entitlement that she rarely brought out to play.

“Kiddo,” Michelle sighed. “It’s not about not wanting anyone to know. We just-- Our lives are hectic enough as it is without the added stress of planning a wedding, and we really…” she laughed at herself, at the way she couldn’t stop smiling, at the way Peter was looking at her with those big, bright eyes. “We really want to be married already.” 

Morgan considered this for a second before leaning over and picking Max up to rest her on her hip. 

“Are you excited for your aunt and uncle to get married?” she asked. 

“I thought they already were,” Max shrugged. “So it’s about time.” 

Peter cackled, Michelle grinned, and Morgan snorted. 

“Yeah,” she nodded. “It really is, huh?”

Michelle shared a look of relief with Peter because it seemed as though they were about to get their way. 

But then Morgan turned her stern attention back to the two of them. 

“I have conditions.”

“Of course she does,” Peter rolled his eyes. 

“Don’t try me, Parker,” Morgan pointed an accusatory finger at him. “I’m holding the fate of your wedding in my hands.” 

“This is not how I thought today was going to go,” Michelle chuckled. “What are your conditions?”

“I get to come with you to the courthouse,” she said, smug and making Max giggle with the way she was grinning. 

Peter looked to Michelle for her go-ahead, and when she nodded said, “Sure, why not.”

“Awesome,” Morgan beamed. “Also, you have to let my dad throw you a reception.”

“Absolutely not,” Peter immediately pushed back. 

“We can’t let him do that,” Michelle agreed. 

“You guys are ridiculous,” Morgan laughed. “I mean. Look, you wanna do this thing on your own-- fair enough, if anyone gets not wanting their whole life to be on display it’s me. But you’ve got this great family, and they’ve been waiting for years to be able to see you guys be genuinely _happy,_ so have a frickin’ party, y’know?” 

An obvious air of concession befell the room, touched with a hint of guilt trip, but neither Peter nor Michelle really had it in them to argue against that line of reasoning. 

So, it looked like they were going to have a frickin’ party. 

*

Morgan connected her phone to the sound system in the car and led them all in a predictably loud rendition of “Going to the Chapel” that had Max practically crying with laughter. 

It wasn’t part of the plan that Michelle had meticulously put together to make the day possible, but then again, nothing about their life had been built with all that much forethought, so perhaps it was more fitting this way. 

On the walk from where they parked to the front entrance of the courthouse, they passed a little flower stand, and Peter bought a bouquet of white daisies, tucking one into Michelle’s curly updo. 

Morgan alternated taking pictures and video with Peter’s camera and her own phone and Max took control of the flowers for safe keeping. 

“You can still make a run for it,” Morgan hissed to Michelle loudly after they had checked in and were waiting to be called. “I’ll cover for you, no one has to know.” 

“I appreciate the offer,” Michelle smirked. “But unfortunately I think I kinda like him.” 

“Didja hear that, Max?” Peter whispered just as loud to the child in his lap. “She likes me. She _really likes me!”_

Michelle shoved at his shoulder. 

“I’m very excited to be able to threaten divorce when you pull shit like this,” she deadpanned. 

Peter beamed at her. “Me too.” 

*

The ceremony itself was as quick as it was heartfelt, with Max and Morgan sitting witness while Peter and Michelle read handwritten vows and the whole lot of them tried their damndest not to cry. 

Michelle, who had spent most of her life expecting to never get married, or start a family, or really care all that deeply about missing out on those things, had expected the day to feel surreal. It didn’t. 

In all actuality, it was the most present in her body she thought maybe she had ever felt. The joy was in the flushed tips of her ears, and the love was pressing up against the bottom of her ribs, and the hope was grounding her in the very bottoms of her feet. 

The grief, the loss, the missing pieces were there too, sitting in her stomach with a steady familiarity. It was strange, the fact that the longer Gwen was gone the more presently Michelle felt her in her life. 

Maybe all she had to do to feel close to her, was to let go of the guilt. And on that day, standing across from that man, the guilt was finally, unbelievably gone. Even if only for a moment. 

“I now pronounce you married.”

Peter swung Michelle into a dipped kiss that had her laughing and had Morgan and Max up on their feet cheering. 

Morgan made them take photos in front of the courthouse, and even dragged the guy working the nearby hot dog stand over so that she could be in some of them too. Michelle knew that the minute they got in the car that everyone in their family would have access to a stream of photos and video from the day, but she didn’t care. 

She was married to Peter Parker, she was married to her best friend, and she really didn’t care who knew it. 

“After you, my dear wife,” Peter offered her his arm as he led them back to the car. 

Michelle, blushing like she was sixteen and crushing on the boy on her AcaDec team, hooked her arm around his and leaned into his side. 

“Why thank you, my dear husband.”

*

_A recreation of one of their wedding photos. Michelle holding Max in her arms while Peter wrapped his arms around the both of them and pressed a grinning kiss against Michelle’s cheek._

*

It was only about a month and a half after their wedding that Max started the first grade. 

Michelle and Peter both made sure they had the morning free for the occasion, because although Max was bouncing out of her skin with excitement, they were a little more apprehensive about the whole thing. 

It wasn’t unreasonable, Michelle thought, for them to be moderately overprotective. Knowing what they knew about the world and the unpredictability of tragic, life altering events made something as seemingly simple as sending a child off to the first grade feel risky. 

But they did it anyway-- the early morning breakfast and the brown bag lunch and the purple backpack (because purple was the favorite color of the moment but would probably change again within a handful of months) and the drive to school. 

“Uncle Peter, you gotta let go,” Max whined into Peter’s shoulder where he was hugging her at drop off. “Lily’s waiting for me!”

Lily was a friend from ballet who had miraculously ended up in Max’s class by pure luck, a fact that was unrelated to their best friend and his very talented and stealthy computer hacking talents. 

“I know, I know,” Peter pulled away reluctantly, doing a piss poor job of hiding the tears in his eyes. “We’ll be here to pick you up at the end of the day, alright?”

“Yep!” Max bounced on the balls of her feet with her hands wrapped around the straps of her backpack. “Can I go now?”

“Kiss first,” Michelle leaned over so Max could kiss her sloppily on the cheek. “Thanks, baby. Have a good day.”

“Love you, bye!” Max said, already running up the path to meet Lily and walk into school holding her hand. 

Peter stood up, wiping at his face. 

“Are you sweating?” he asked. “I’m sweating.”

“The janitorial staff is hiring,” Michelle responded. “I could get a job here and watch her all day.” 

“Genius,” Peter said through a watery laugh. 

Michelle watched the front entrance to the school for a beat longer before releasing a heavy breath. 

“Okay, Waterworks,” she took his hand and turned him back towards the car. “Go ahead and start your countdown.”

“‘Til the end of the day?” Peter followed her easily. 

“Until she moves out.” 

Peter shot her a look as he rounded the front of the car to the driver’s seat. 

“Saying that is grounds for divorce,” he deadpanned. 

“Send the papers to my office,” she fired back without any heat as they both ducked into the car. 

Two doors closing, the engine turning over, the radio automatically kicking on only for Michelle to switch it back off. Morning light streamed through dirty windows as they pulled out of the school parking lot.

“We’re doing a good job, right?” Peter asked over the click of his turn signal. “Her life is good?” 

Michelle reached over the consul and placed a hand on Peter’s thigh. 

“I think…” she contemplated not saying what she was saying, not on that morning when they were both already emotionally compromised. But maybe it needed to be said, and maybe she should have been saying it all along, just to make sure he knew. “I think Gwen made the most important decision of her life when she wrote your name into her will.” 

He didn’t look at her, but he breathed deeply and squeezed her hand and said--

“I’m gonna buy you coffee before I drop you off.”

They were doing alright. 

*

_Lucky the black cat, curled up at the foot of a twin-sized bed, with her head resting on a pair of tiny socked feet._

*

A black cat named Lucky was exactly the type of contradiction that Michelle Jones thrived off of, so when she had moved back to New York to find one of her best friends pregnant and the rest of them scrambling to catch up in their own _growing up_ just so they could be there to help, she hadn’t hesitated in taking responsibility for a new little life. 

For the following seven years, Lucky was a beloved member of the family-- she tolerated the fumbling pets of a toddler and found joy in dragging Peter’s socks (and only Peter’s socks) out of the laundry to hide them behind the refrigerator. 

She was a good cat, the best, and when Michelle had to take her to the vet to be put down before her illness got too painful to bear, she cried. 

She took Lucky on a long drive that day, letting her curl up on the dashboard and watch the city with big, bright eyes. She held her in her arms for forty-five minutes in the parking lot and stroked her in that spot right between her eyes to keep her calm on the vet’s table. 

She kissed her goodbye and sobbed in her car and then went home and pulled it together because Max was wailing and Peter had been stuck trying to calm her down on his own all day. 

It was difficult to explain to a seven-year-old why her kitty, her best friend, her first word, was never going to come home again, and it was even harder when that seven-year-old was particularly clever and started to realize that _this_ is what they meant when they said her mom passed away when she was a baby. 

They let Max curl up between them in their bed, and held her close, and let her sob for a loss she was only just starting to understand. It hurt more now, still confused by death but learning how much it hurt. 

Even as an adult, even after knowing grief like an old friend the way Michelle did, she still found herself baffled by it, baffled by death and the temporary nature of all the things she loved. 

Michelle got the call about Gwen Stacy’s death in the early hours of the morning. It was Ned that had told her, although she couldn’t remember who had told him, and she almost didn’t believe him until she turned on the news and saw the headline. 

A young woman had been killed by the Green Goblin, dropped from the sky in a fatal freefall and even Spider-Man hadn’t been able to save her. 

The newscaster was the one to inform her that Harry Osborn was the Green Goblin. 

She threw up in the kitchen sink mid panic attack and emailed her boss to let her know she wouldn’t be into work that day in that order, and then went to work in trying to track down Peter Parker. 

Because his phone was sending her straight to voicemail which meant it was dead or shattered somewhere and Gwen was dead and Harry had killed her and Michelle just needed to know that one of them had made it through the night. 

“He’s at the Compound,” May told her, clearly shaken just by the sound of her voice over the phone. “I’m heading up there soon, if you want to come.”

Michelle hadn’t, and she would regret it later, but at the moment all she had wanted to do was be alone and try to breathe past the hurt. 

The realization that she had barely even thought about Max that day haunted her now, with the little girl who had cried herself to sleep with her face buried in Michelle’s hip. 

“I wanted to give her a world that was different from ours,” Peter said, soft enough not to wake her. “One that wasn’t out to destroy her.” 

“Yeah,” Michelle breathed in agreement. 

Peter leaned over the sleeping body between them to kiss her on the forehead and Michelle let herself lean into it. 

The next day, Max would start asking questions about where she came from, about who her parents were, about all the things that made her family different from her friends’. They would do their best, and they would fuck it up, and they would try again. 

But for the night, they held her close, and they grieved. 

A cat, a woman, a childhood changing. 

_**nine** _

**_years_ **

**_later._ **

The sun had gone down and Michelle had made them tea, and something that she had mentioned earlier in the night was sticking in Max’s brain. 

“Do you think it’s still like that now?” she asked. “That she haunts us?”

Michelle fiddled with the blanket around Max’s shoulders, absentmindedly pulling it tighter around her and keeping it from sliding to the kitchen floor. 

“I do,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s a bad thing, if that’s what you mean.”

Max frowned at this. “How can it not be? Haunting is-- it’s just bad all around, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” was Michelle’s easy response, all that simple honesty that Max didn’t yet have the maturity to understand. “But isn’t that what it is to carry someone with you that you’ve lost? To be haunted by them in some way? It doesn’t have to be anything as obvious as good or bad because, if they’re with you all the time-- which I think your mom is-- then they’re around for the bad stuff, but they’re there for all the good stuff, the _best_ stuff, too.” 

She was smart, Max’s aunt, and she had also had a good number more years to really contemplate the intricacies of grief while Max had been preoccupied with the childlike desire for easy answers. Yes or no, black or white, good or bad. 

At sixteen, she was starting to understand that none of it was that clear-cut, but she didn’t have the chance to say as much because the window was opening and their resident family superhero was climbing back through. 

“Status report?” Michelle asked in a well-practiced check-in that Max hadn’t been privy to until after she was in high school, but knew had started a good long time ago. 

“Coupl’a bruises,” Peter pulled off his mask, which left his hair sticking up wildly. “Nothing worth writing home about.” 

He kissed Michelle chastly and then pushed at Max’s head with the gentle palm of his hand before sitting down beside her. 

“How’s the art history lesson going?” he asked, peeking at the page opened to a sketch of Max and Lucky.

“Good,” Max offered him a small smile, which she knew relayed the fact that she was okay, but ultimately still a little messed up. “I can’t believe these have been in a box for so long, they’re really good.” 

“Right?” Peter shot Michelle a look that Max knew meant she’d stepped into an old conversation. 

“Shut up,” Michelle said flatly in response, but Peter just looked smug. 

“And would you look at that,” he grinned. “No signs of any cake being eaten without me, which means--”

Max grabbed the cake box and pulled it across the table in an instant, throwing open the flap and pulling out a chunk of cake and icing with her bare hand. She stuffed it in her mouth, getting it all over her lips and cheeks and dropping crumbs onto the table, grinning up at his gobsmacked face all the while. 

“Despicable girl,” he gasped as Michelle laughed brightly. “Who _raised_ you?” 

“Some weirdos who taught me _thank you_ and _dumbass_ at the same time,” Max said through a mouthful of cake. 

Peter grimaced, amusement shining through the sheen of sweat on his face. 

“Here,” he got up and pulled three forks out of the drawer. “I’m gonna change, but I _guess_ you can get started without me.”

They did start without him, and he caught up with ease once he’d thrown on sweatpants and a t-shirt and rejoined them in their birthday cake eating endeavors. Peter told them a little about his patrol and Max showed him some of her favorite pages from Michelle’s sketchbook in return, and before long they had migrated to the couches because Max wasn’t ready to go sit in her room by herself and her parents weren’t blind to that. 

“Uncle Pete, can I ask you something?” Max spoke up after the three of them were stuffed full with cake and changed into pajamas, flipping quietly through Michelle’s sketchbooks together. 

“Anything.”

“MJ said-- earlier she said she thinks my mom is around all the time,” she tucked her legs up underneath her on the armchair facing where Michelle and Peter sat on the couch. “Do you think so too?”

He thought about it for a moment, and then with a flicker of a smile: “I don’t know.” 

“Don’t be a scientist for a second,” Max begged him. “Do you think any part of her could be left?”

“Here,” Peter stood up, grabbed a picture frame from the mantel and crouched down in front of her. “What’s this a picture of?” 

Max gave him an odd look. “The day I was born,” she said, because obviously it was. “Me and Mom. You took it.” 

That photograph of Gwen holding her newborn daughter had been on their mantle for as long as Max could remember. 

“How do you know that?” Peter pressed, purposefully obstinate. Max could tell he was about to make a point but she hadn’t beat him to it yet. 

“Because I do,” she replied with equal stubbornness. 

“Work with me here,” Peter continued, stern but warm. “You don’t remember this day-- You were there but you don’t remember it. So how do you know so much about this picture?” 

“I dunno,” she said flatly. “Because you told me?” 

“Yeah,” he beamed up at her. 

“I don’t get it.”

“Maxine, I took this picture thinking it was for us-- the ones who were there to be able to remember,” he explained. “But the older I get the more I realize that we take these pictures, we-- fill these journals and sketchbooks with words and art and ticket stubs-- because they’re pieces of us that we get to leave behind. For _you_ \-- for the people who didn’t know us then but want to know what life was like. So they can keep carrying us with them, in one way or another, even after we’re gone.”

“In memories,” Max finished for him. Peter nodded at her with quiet enthusiasm. 

“You know, she told me something once,” he said. “She was-- I mean, you were probably three weeks old so she was hysterical with exhaustion and freaking out about how much she didn’t know about how to raise a kid, but she told me-- crying because you were crying and she couldn’t figure out how to help you-- she told me: _I have to get this right. I have to, Peter, because nothing else I do in life will matter as much as the way I treat this baby. She’s my legacy…_ You know what that means?”

“What?” she asked, voice small but heart huge. 

“You’re the only one of us who gets to be a living, breathing part of her,” he poked a finger against her knee gently. “So if any of us carry her with us-- it’s you, Maxine Gwendolyne.”

Max felt herself begin to cry and so when Peter pulled them both up to standing so he could hug her properly, she let him and, in fact, hugged him back twice as hard. 

“How can I miss her when I never even knew her?” she murmured into his shoulder, tears leaking out of tightly closed eyes. 

“She was just that kind of person.” 

And for the first time, Max was unconcerned about where she had come from, because she knew. 

And more importantly, she knew who she wanted to be. 


	5. Max (Epilogue)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maxine Gwendolyne Stacy had three first names, all of which had once belonged to her mother.

Maxine Gwendolyne Stacy had three first names, all of which had once belonged to her mother. 

Apparently, Maxine had a lot of things that had once belonged to her mother. Her hair and eyes were always being pointed out as being eerily familiar, her sense of humor, the way she had one Peter Parker wrapped around her little finger. 

Maxine couldn’t have known the accuracy of any of these statements, of course, because she’d been violently orphaned at all of three months old and could only really go off of the stories people were willing to tell her. 

But it was more than she had once had, and it was more meaningful than she had once believed, and maybe that knowledge alone could be enough. That knowledge that she would never be a primary source on one Gwen Stacy, but that Gwen Stacy had certainly been loved and she had certainly loved deeply in return. 

Which was why, when two days after her sixteenth birthday Max found herself dancing along to someone else’s playlist with Morgan in the open space of the Stark penthouse, she felt the closest to content she had in a long time. Maybe all her life. 

It was her birthday party, because although neither of her parents particularly liked the spotlight to be on them, they were huge advocates of making a major deal out of every minor milestone in Max’s life. The whole family was there, every last unrelated one of them, and Max was dancing in such a way that would have made her ballet teachers cringe or laugh or something in between. 

She danced and ate too much cake and danced some more. She played poker against Tony Stark and very nearly won. She let Michelle put a too-small Spider-Man party hat on her head and then forced Peter into a scowling selfie with her. 

She had fun, and she let the past few days simmer on the backburner, let all that emotion settle itself in the background. 

*

“Are you sure that you’re okay?” Haeli asked her as they walked into school Monday morning. “That’s, like, kind of a lot for one weekend.”

“I’m _fine,_ Haeli,” Max insisted for around the seventh time since she had begun filling her friend in via text the day before. “I mean, it’s a lot to process but it’s not like she died over the weekend. That’s not new.”

“Isn’t it sort of like that though?” Haeli dodged a group of freshmen pushing past them in the hallway. “I mean, yeah it’s not new, but if you know her better now, isn’t it kind of like mourning her all over again?”

Max released a heavy breath as they came to a halt in front of her locker, spinning her combination as she considered this. Haeli was sometimes maybe a little too perceptive for how lacking in tact she could be. 

“Yeah, maybe,” Max relented. “I dunno, dude. I think maybe the whole mourning thing never really stops with something like this.” 

“Fair enough,” Haeli leaned against the lockers with her shoulder. “But if you ever wanna talk about it…” she shrugged. 

Max smiled at her, thinking for a moment how Peter and Ned and MJ had all gone to high school together and how even all these years later they were still such major parts of each other’s lives. She hoped that Haeli was a friend like that. She couldn’t imagine a world without her. 

“You know, she did debate team,” Max said. “My mom, I mean. She was team captain her senior year.” 

“No way!” Haeli grinned at her, pulling at the debate t-shirt she was wearing as if Max hadn’t already noticed it. “I knew our friendship was fated.” 

“Because you and my dead mom had the same extracurriculars?” Max laughed. “I think that just means you’re both nerds.” 

“Hey, from what it sounds like in all those journals, I’m honored to have anything in common with that woman.” 

The smile on Max’s face was flushed pink with gratitude and pride as she slammed her locker shut to make sure the finicky mechanism stuck. 

“Stacy! Hey!” 

Both Haeli and Max turned at the abrupt outburst down the hall and watched as their classmate pushed through the crowd of students, backpack unzipped as he dug around loose papers and pens. 

“Hey! I caught you, good,” he said as he skidded to a panting stop in front of them. 

“Hey, dude, what’s up?” Max smiled. He was a scatterbrain, but he was her lab partner in Chemistry and had been really helpful in making sure she didn’t wildly disappoint the tribe of STEM majors at her house. Which was to say, he was very, very good at Chemistry. 

“Uh-- here,” he pulled a stapled collection of photocopied pages out of his bag, a little bent around the edges but otherwise neat, and handed them over. “You missed Friday, so I--uh, copied my notes for you? Y’know, since finals are coming up and-- you’ll probably wanna see what you missed… or whatever.” 

Haeli was looking between the two of them gleefully, but Max decided to ignore her for the time being. 

“Thanks, Miles,” she took the offered pages and flipped through them a little bit. She frowned. “This does not look… easy. God, why are they teaching us such difficult shit so late in the year?” 

“Yeah, right?” Miles made a face in sympathetic agreement. “I mean-- I could, uh, help you? If you want. Since I was, y’know, in class and stuff.” 

Max’s heart fluttered in an unfamiliar way. “That-- would be really cool of you,” she said. 

“Cool,” his eyes lit up. “Yeah, awesome, um-- You have study hall sixth right? Because I aid for Missus Griffin that period and she lets me do whatever I want so if you got a pass to the library--”

“Okay,” Max cut in eagerly. “Yeah, I’ll-- do that.” 

“Great! Cool, I’ll see you-- then,” he began to walk away, shoulders up high next to his ears and blushing. 

“Bye, Miles,” Haeli grinned. 

“Oh!” he noticed her, probably for the first time the whole conversation. “See ya, Haeli.” 

And then he was gone, and Max could feel her own blush spreading across her chest and up her neck. 

“That was the most painfully geeky bout of flirting I’ve ever witnessed,” Haeli said delightedly. “And I was there when Jake Haffley asked Lillian to the prom at a Spell Bowl practice.” 

“Shut up,” Max groused, walking away and forcing her friend to follow. “That was not flirting.”

“That, my dear Maxine, was absolutely flirting,” Haeli laughed. “And with Miles Morales! God, do you think if you ask nicely he’ll spray paint a portrait of you in the subway?”

“His art is actually very cool!” Max defended, but Haeli just added an extra skip to her step as if Max had passed some sort of test. 

“You’ve got it so bad!” she cackled. “Don’t worry, I’ll text MJ later to make sure she remembers to give you the talk.” 

The bell rang and Haeli began to skip in the other direction just as Max screeched out after her--

_“Pareekh, I will end you!”_

_**seven** _

**_months_ **

**_later._ **

Max spent her summer mostly preoccupied with ballet intensives and movie nights with Haeli and pretending not to have a crush on the guy from her Chemistry class. 

She spent the fall trying to focus on school despite the fact that she had been cast as the Snowflake Princess in their annual production of the Nutcracker and that the boy from her Chemistry class bought a ticket the moment they went on sale. 

She spent the whole of the year getting more settled in her own skin and becoming less afraid to ask questions about her family history, about where she came from. 

She spent the early hours of Christmas morning at the studio. 

*

Peter had put Max into ballet classes when she was four years old, and she knew that back then it had been a way for her to work off her extra energy, to make more friends her own age, to start developing some of her creative instincts. 

Beginning ballet class once a week was pretty affordable on the Parker budget, but dancing well over ten hours of classes a week plus the cost of pointe shoes that she wore through with record speeds was certainly not. So, Max had found a way to pay off some of her tuition costs by coming in on off days and cleaning the studios. 

She really didn’t mind it-- it gave her some time to herself, some time that she used just as much to practice in an empty studio as she did to actually clean said studio. 

Which was why she was there that morning, clearing out spider webs from behind the sound system where no one ever thought to dust. Peter was Jewish and Michelle didn’t really have any religious ties, so they generally celebrated Hanukkah in a more intimate, immediate family setting, but were still expected at the Tower for presents and dinner every Christmas Day so she was on a bit of a time crunch. 

She still found time to reprise her role of Snowflake Princess with bare feet to an audience of zero, however, before she shoved her cleaning supplies back into the closet, changed into the ugliest Christmas sweater she could find at their local Goodwill, and locked up the studio behind her. 

*

The penthouse smelled of freshly cooked turkey and baking pie when Max hurried out of the elevator ten minutes later than she’d promised. 

She shed her coat and dropped it on top of the pile on the couch and was immediately rewarded with jeers and taunts about her sweater all mixed up together with reprimands for being late. Max just twirled and flipped her hair over her shoulder as if posing on a runway. 

Morgan dragged her away almost immediately to help with the green bean casserole-- the singular dish she had been tasked with because, at twenty-six years old Morgan Stark was a brilliant engineer and a pretty terrible cook. 

“Are you sure you’ve got the oven at the right temperature?” 

“Dad, shut up, I’m trying to focus!”

Max snorted, and when Morgan turned her back adjusted the oven temp. 

*

Max sat across from Morgan at the far end of the table which, to this day, was still referred to as the children’s section. Morgan had pushed back against the title for a period of a few years after she started college, but these days she had started leaning into it again. 

Max figured tradition only became more important with age, not less. 

Boisterous laughter and overlapping conversations filled the room with warmth and Max watched as Pepper carved the turkey; Tony and Rhodey argued over the right way to eat mashed potatoes-- with or without gravy; Peter stole a roll off of Michelle’s plate only for her to steal it right back; and everyone gave a round of applause for Morgan’s casserole which they deemed _a better attempt than last year!_

There was always something melancholy to family events, and Max had always felt so, even if she hadn’t always understood why. She thought she was starting to get it now, the fact that on days of celebration the missing people, the empty chairs, the lost voices were more prominent than usual. 

And these people, her people, had lost an awful lot over the years. 

The thing about her mother’s death in particular, that Max realized now looking at all of them in one place, and having the context of the past finally in her tool belt, was that this singular event, this singular loss had changed them, all of them, in permanent and irrevocable ways. 

Max looked at someone like Tony Stark for instance, who was holding her in the very moments that her mother was falling to the Earth, and knew that he had to have grappled with the way he continued to raise his own daughter. How stubborn should he allow her to be, how headstrong, how resistant to orders in the face of her own beliefs. How much like Gwen Stacy, truly, at the end of it all. 

May Parker was different. She took her grief in stride the way only a widow, a single mother truly could, and used it in whatever way she could get her hands on. Max had been told stories about how she had survived the Snap-- something which she found strange to learn about both in textbooks and at her own kitchen table-- and how she had spent five years taking her grief for her nephew and using it to help the orphaned children of the world. She’d done it again when Gwen died, only Max was the orphan in question. 

Michelle Jones was all over her mother’s journals-- in stories and photos and little references to _Baby, you won’t believe what MJ said to me today._ Max knew that she had once been staunchly against having children, but she also knew that she had fought for the baby that carried her mother’s name with her entire chest. Something had changed there, and maybe it was as much finding Max as it was losing Gwen.

And then there was Peter. 

Peter Parker, who had loved and lost and loved again-- terrified and unafraid and, at the end of it all, courageous with the way he gave his heart away. Everything in him changed when Gwen died, except for that. Max knew because he loved her, because he would do anything to protect her, because he got angry at her when she fucked up and sad for her when she was hurt. 

When she was younger, Max had thought that the discomfort that came along with conversations about Gwen was born exclusively from a place of sadness, or guilt, or pain. She thought that people got quiet out of an ongoing, endless mourning period, but she realized now that she had been wrong. 

The discomfort was in trying to bring Gwen into a context where none of them were the same people she had left behind and in fact the world itself was different for what it had lost. 

The quiet, quite simply, was reverence. 

*

When the time for presents rolled around, a certain anxiety began to settle into Max’s chest. 

She kept it at bay, had gotten pretty good at that in her time on Earth, but it was there nonetheless. It was there as she watched her family exchange gifts with each other and it was there as she sat on the floor in front of where Morgan was braiding tinsel into her hair and opened a box of brand new leotards that she had asked for. 

Because there was a thin box under the tree labeled _Aunt MJ and Uncle Peter_ in her looping handwriting, and she knew it would be opened all in due time. 

“Okay, who’s next?” Peter crouched down to grab the very present that was causing Max so much grief. “I see my name,” he grinned as he carried it back to the couch. 

“That one’s for the both of you,” Max said, heart hammering against her ribs and skin itching with sweat beneath her sweater. 

“Both of us, huh?” Peter teased. “I’m pretty sure we didn’t raise you to think joint presents were acceptable, Maxine.”

Michelle smacked his chest with the back of her hand and pulled the thin box into her lap. 

“Hey!”

“You just lost your present opening privileges so I’m taking over,” she deadpanned, but there was a smile to her eyes as she began to peel the paper back. 

“Harsh deal,” Peter said as he pulled the bow off and stuck it on the top of Michelle’s head. “But I respect your moral integrity.” 

“You’re both so annoying,” Max said. Boy did she love them. 

Michelle lifted the lid of the box and Max’s heart began to hammer in earnest, began to really roll along at a steady pace as Peter extracted the folder inside, a curious look on his face. 

“Are you billing us?” he looked at Max with a grin on his face even as Michelle opened the folder and realized what was inside. Her face morphed from casual contentedness to something eons more vulnerable in two seconds flat and then she nudged Peter’s shoulder to get his attention. 

“Peter,” she breathed. _“Look.”_

Max’s hands were sweating where she clutched them in her lap, trembling with how tight her knuckles were interlocked. Maybe she should have done this in private, she thought. Maybe she shouldn’t have done it at all, because she wasn’t entirely positive that it was something they wanted, but they had tipped over the point of no return and she just had to sit through it, wait for the aftermath to play in whatever way it chose. 

Whatever way they chose. 

“Oh,” Peter exhaled as he read, hand coming up to cover his mouth as his eyes became suddenly shinier. “Max… Really?” 

“Only if you want,” she shrugged, feeling small. “I just figured… you already are, y’know?”

Michelle rested a hand on her own chest, thumb smoothing across her collar bone as she looked at Max with unrestrained care.

“Is someone gonna fill the rest of us in on what’s going on?” Tony chimed in, earning himself a _shush_ from both his wife and daughter. 

“Of course we want,” Peter laughed tearfully, offering a passing glance to Michelle who smiled back at him with matching levels of adoration. “Right?”

“Of course,” Michelle nodded in agreement. “Of course, of course.”

Peter dropped the folder on a pile of coats to his left and stood up to pull Max off the ground by her hands. 

“Come here,” he said as he pulled her into a hug. “I can’t believe you’re making me cry on Christmas, you little menace.” 

Max laughed, but the sound of it wasn’t enough to convince anyone that she wasn’t crying too. 

“My turn,” Michelle pulled at Max’s arm so she could hug her as well, but Peter simply turned it into a group hug instead, unwilling to let go of either of them. 

During their entire little spectacle, May reached over and snatched the folder so she could get some answers. 

“ _Oh,”_ she breathed, and in answer to all of the questioning gazes on her, the eager hands reaching out to take a look for themselves, she explained, “Adoption papers.” 

“Wait, question,” Peter pulled away sniffling to look at Max. “Do you know a lawyer? How did you get this put together?”

“Um…” Max smiled sheepishly at him. “ _You_ know a lawyer…?”

“You did not go to Hell’s Kitchen by yourself,” Michelle gaped at her. “Maxine, come on.” 

“That’s-- I can’t believe he didn’t tell me,” Peter floundered. 

“Guys, you realize you were both doing twice as dangerous shit when you were her age, right?” Morgan laughed at them. 

Peter turned on her. “I’ll cut you out of our wedding photos, don’t try it.”

“You threaten that once a month,” Morgan deadpanned. “Do it or get a new threat, old man.” 

Michelle let out a slow breath. “Sorry, kiddo. I know this was supposed to be a heartfelt moment but these idiots are incapable of sincerity.” 

She looked at Peter, the man who wasn’t her father and still wouldn’t really be with an adoption in place, but the man who had said _I’m your Uncle Peter_ and _I’m gonna take care of you_ and _your mom loved you so much, I love you so much, you are so, so loved_ and never let her forget a word of it.

“That’s okay,” Max grinned as Morgan and Peter continued to bicker loudly in the background, about an inch away from starting a wrapping paper fight. “This feels right.” 

*

“You’re sure?” Peter asked her on the ride home later that night, when they were full to the brim with Christmas dinner and had a trunk full of presents. “I don’t want you to feel pressured into this.”

“I’m sure, Uncle Pete,” Max replied. “I just-- I guess I realized you’ve always been my parents, and I wanted you to know that I-- that I know that now. And that I love you.”

“You better stop that right now or I’ll have to pull over to hug you again.” 

Max laughed, but Michelle reached back from the passenger seat and squeezed her niece’s hand. 

*

Max didn’t go back to read Gwen’s journals very often, because there was a certain headspace she needed to be in to absorb them in a beneficial way rather than something more self destructive. 

But on that night, before she went to bed, Max pulled out the journal entry from the day she was born and curled up in bed. The light of her bedside lamp was a soothing yellow and the fresh snow outside her window glittered in the colorful lights of their neighbors across the way. 

She could hear the gentle voices of Peter and Michelle in the living room, quiet laughter and the clink of mugs that she knew they used for wine although she wasn’t sure why they’d never just bought wine glasses. There was a text on her phone from Haeli, wishing her a merry Christmas from one non-Christian to another, and a series of photos from Miles of the cookies he had burnt but chose to eat anyway. 

Her Christmas sweater sat discarded on the floor and a set of adoption papers sat signed on the kitchen table and she was home. 

As the day came to a close, Max opened up a yellow journal and pulled her blanket closer around her shoulders. 

_I’m not sure what to say,_ Gwen wrote. _I guess I’m not sure of all that much these days, but I am sure that I love you. And I am sure that I want to hold you in my arms for the rest of my life. And I am sure that you are the best thing to ever happen to me._

_I’m sure that you are beautiful, inside and out. And I’m sure that you are mine, but aside from that I’ve got nothing. I suppose, with you around, nothing else really matters._

_Welcome to the world, Baby. You’ve gone and made me speechless._

An idea struck Max, as her heart filled with warmth at the sight of her mother’s handwriting, the way those words had been meant just for her and here she was, absorbing them in the way she had always been meant to be. 

She leaned out of bed just enough to dig through the bottom drawer of her bedside table, rooting around until she found a blank spiral-bound notebook that she had ended up not needing for school that semester. 

A blue pen from the cup on her desk and a lined page in front of her, she wasn’t sure entirely what to say, but she knew that someday, someone somewhere might find comfort in her words. 

She just didn’t know their name yet. 

Maxine Gwendolyne Stacy put pen to paper…

_To whom it may concern,_

End.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all so, so much for reading and for sticking around for this whole little saga <3 I really do appreciate you taking the time to give this thing a chance and leave such lovely comments. 
> 
> I'm @ premiere-pro on tumblr if you ever wanna come say hi <3 
> 
> Thank you!


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